If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Domains?

Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by atgm on Friday February 18, 2011 @07:03PM (#2237822)

Why do people use .ly anyway? It's not like there aren't other two-letter domains out there.

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Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by endtime on Friday February 18, 2011 @07:05PM (#2237829)

Probably at first because it was a common English suffix and/or had a lot of short, readable domains available. Now it's trendy on top of that.

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Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by zach on Saturday February 19, 2011 @02:11AM (#2238660)

It's a domain fad that (as far as I can tell) started with Writely becoming popular five years ago. Here's a rundown of recent domain fads as I recall them:

2003: del.icio.us con.fuses.us

2004: 37signals helps create 43 Things and Jay-Z has "99 Problems" -- coincidence? I think not.

2005: Flickr makes a splash and gets acquired, penultimate vowels no longr requird

2006: Writely, the superbly adverbly named webapp, goes Googly

2007: Xobni presses rewind (okay, this one never took off)

2008: Adverbs come on stronger with .ly

2009: URL shorteners go.to 6 characters or less

I can't actually think of a domain name fad that hit last year. Any suggestions?

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Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by burgerbrain on Friday February 18, 2011 @07:08PM (#2237840)

It's some dumb marketing gimmick. The idea basically seems to boil down to "only old foggies use the major gTLDs these days, lets be hip and make our company name an adjective that is also our URL".

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Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by timerickson on Friday February 18, 2011 @09:07PM (#2238121)

It's more than a gimmick. A recognizable and memorable URL has proven to be extremely beneficial to new startups. Memorable .com addresses are becoming endangered, or very very expensive.

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Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by burgerbrain on Friday February 18, 2011 @09:39PM (#2238180)

To this day I have to doublecheck myself on where the '.'s are places in "del.icio.us" (in fact, it abandoning this URL some time ago). Now, "amazon.com"? Absolutely no worries there.

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Re:If Libya Shuts Down the Internet, What Happens To .ly Dom... by carlygeehr on Friday February 18, 2011 @07:28PM (#2237895)

because how else would my entire url be just my first name (car.ly)? true, probably a mis-use... but really fun, in a super nerdy kind of way.

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