Re:As HN: Startup name — dot com or not dot com?
by mechanical_fish on Thursday February 03, 2011 @08:51AM
(#2174675)
That's two. ;) And I'd argue that bit.ly has a special advantage in the confusing-silly-suffix department, being a service that appeals mostly to (a) relatively sophisticated people who know about URLs -- they know what URLs are, and they know that a short URL is better, and they know that one URL can redirect to another -- and (b) robots that shorten URLs automatically and that are very good at remembering arbitrary rules.
Can we name any other prominent examples of non-dot-com stardom? The poster child of the cutesy URL movement, delicio.us, dropped the idea halfway through its rise to, um, near-death and relative obscurity at the hands of Yahoo. So I'm not sure they're a very promising example. Any other big stars? What am I missing?
Drop.io was acquired (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/facebook-acquires-drop-io-n...), and bit.ly seems to be doing well.