News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:As HN: Startup name — dot com or not dot com? by aneesh on Thursday February 03, 2011 @07:56AM (#2174530)
I think the standard thing to do would be to get a dotcom, even if you have to be creative with the name. But there have been successes with non-dotcoms:

Drop.io was acquired (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/facebook-acquires-drop-io-n...), and bit.ly seems to be doing well.

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?