
Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain - foxhop
https://linkpeek.com/blog/website-screenshot-of-every-two-letter-domain.html
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cmapes
Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them,
just like many other potentially useful domain names online.

I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website
and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at
domain squatters.

~~~
bratsche
Yeah, it's frustrating. There's a domain that I wanted, and the guy who's got
it has been squatting on it for years and years. So I contacted him about it
about 3 years ago and he said:

"Thank you for your interest. The web site is under extensive development and
is not for sale. Only a (1) public company or (2) private company with sales
in excess of $5B would be considered."

First of all, that website looks the same now as it did 10 years ago. So I'm
not sure what "extensive development" means. And second of all, why would it
be any of his concern whether my company is public or makes $5B in sales?

That really rubbed me the wrong way. I'd rather just get back a ridiculous
number that I'm obviously not going to pay.

~~~
pavlov
If it's a good domain, you're certainly not the only one who contacted him
about the domain just out of curiosity. He's getting a lot of emails about it.

If he did what you suggest and replied to everyone with a ridiculous price --
"Hi, USD 20 million, ok?" \-- then he'd just get a second wave of emails from
people trying to haggle:

"That's outrageous! The domain is worth $100k maximum. I'll pay you $2k and
give you 0.1% equity in my awesome startup. Deal?"

And if he doesn't reply to that, then the person will send another email with
the worthless offer slightly tweaked, and so on... So he's better off setting
a precondition that prevents the pointless replies, basically "I'll talk to
you only if you have a legal department with more than 20 people."

~~~
bratsche
It's honestly not _that_ good of a domain though. I don't think it's worth
$100k. Maybe $10k, although I'm not about to spend that much on a domain (but
maybe someone will).

Anyway, good luck to him. I hope when he is ready to sell his domain there is
someone looking to buy it for the kind of money he's expecting.

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snide
I used to be a product/design guy at CNET in their games division. My team was
working on one of the biggest initiatives for the company, launching a new
site with a pretty small team of engineers (think it was 6, we had no
editorial team, just some recent hires for data entry). In any case, we'd been
working on it for 5 months or so, really grueling work, but we were young and
excited about building something with so much potential. One month before the
actual launch someone came up to me and said, "hey, we need you to move the
launch date up two weeks". The reason was pretty boring, the usual executive
needs it for X, and as you'd imagine nobody was very excited about it. So all
the engineers are stuck in a cramp little meeting room bitching about how many
extra hours we'd have to put in to get it done.

Eventually I laughed and said "Well, no one in this room will ever work on a
two-letter domain again. That's probably reason enough. At least we get to say
we launched one."

8 years later I still think about that day. I've had a pretty wild career, but
yep, I doubt I'll ever get to build another TV.com.

Anyways, that's my tiny anecdote about a two letter domain! Worked with a lot
of good people on it and still work with some of them. It's a pretty different
site now, but right out of the gate it was huge and had tons and tons of
community contributions to its episode guides, storing everything in a nice
structured data style. These days all I think is... man, we could have done so
much more with it (we should have put an API out for the data at least). From
what I understand, Google's sidebar related data search results have slowly
been biting at into the traffic of large wiki repositories like TV.com and
IMDB over the past couple years.

~~~
werid
I bet tvrage.com (started in june 2005) eventually stole a lot of traffic from
tv.com, i have vague memories of a redesign by tv.com which broke old links,
and was not very usable.

~~~
snide
tvrage at least as I remember it was built from a crawl from tv.com data. But
yeah, I left the product 6 months after launch and since then it's been in a
dozen different hands and a bunch of redesigns, most moving the focus towards
quick news and away from the wiki. Such is the way of the web.

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simonster
Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the
screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site.

~~~
wepple
Also, running a query on localhost returns an nginx banner

~~~
deanpcmad
That would depend on the server you have installed on localhost

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wepple
no I mean if you run a query via their site for 'localhost' they take a
snapshot of localhost, their own server.

As in:
[https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&t...](https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&token=d9f279b0aa29893db91e11b826d8d914&size=420x200)

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piratebroadcast
If the Admin is here, The very bottom ones (00.com, for example) should
display upwards on hover, not downwards below the footer where it can't be
seen.

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japaget
This doesn't list all possible two-letter domains, just the .com's. There are
others, such as uc.edu, ti.org, and 13.tv.

~~~
WilliamSt
Yep, I thought I was going to find my own domain here.

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drum
I don't like how the popup after you hover on a link covers the links
horizontally to the right. It forces you to move the mouse away, wait for the
popup to dismiss, and then move the mouse over the next link. Maybe move the
popups below the current row of links.

~~~
richardkiss
Like how lnkvu.com works?

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mdotk
Can view the image of one, then subsequent hovers don't load

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hcarvalhoalves
Amazing how 80% is crap.

~~~
hnriot
Isn't that true in general, 80% of tv is crap, 80% of photography, 80% of
twitter/tumblr is crap, 80% of music is crap (country!), 80% of every human
endeavor is crap.

~~~
pluies_public
Indeed:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law)

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brittohalloran
Incredible how many of these are not being utilized

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wyager
There are some weird and strangely compelling sites on that list. I went on a
very strange journey through some of those sites, and I found a chat room
evidently operated by some secretive domain-squatting millionaire filled with
a motley crew of famous shock site operators and random bored folks stumbling
across two-letter domains.

The internet still manages to surprise me sometimes.

~~~
jtreminio
[http://99.com](http://99.com) ?

~~~
wyager
Yep.

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mstrem
I once looked at do.com a few years back. It was owned by Microsoft, and I
thought they wont release that domain unless you pay them a hefty amount of
money.

Someone apparently did. Unless...

~~~
srom
Salesforce did.

[http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-
ano...](http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-another-
great-domain-and-launches-site-com-today/)

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adventured
Much like when I go hunting for a good .com for a new project, it's mildly
depressing to see how many of those two letter domains are rather going to
waste.

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foxhop
follow up post- Firework Project Screenshot evert two-letter Domain:
[http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-
every-t...](http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-two-
letter-domain.html)

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ternaryoperator
It's actually only two-letter (and digit) _.com_ domains.

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ctdonath
Any rules against punctuation in a 2-character domain?

~~~
duskwuff
A domain name component can't start or end with a dash, so it's effectively
disallowed.

