Dropbox was getdropbox.com for a long time, which is 10 letters.
Prepending "get" (or sticking "app" on the end) always makes me kind of queasy, but it worked well enough for Dropbox. I kind of like Exec's approach of using iamexec.com.
Re:The Web Is Unsustainable
by philip1209 on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:39AM
(#4316143)
Square, SquareUp.com, owns Square.com but still uses the former domain.
Phone numbers aren't useful or readable, so the machines that talk to each other use those and I just click "Mary" in my contacts list.
I don't think such a system would be difficult to put in place on the web right now. Linking is done with whatever gobbledygook URLs you don't feel like reading, and if you want to revisit a page, you bookmark it with an alias of your choosing.
EDIT: I should say that I think this is the workflow for >90% of web users already. If they don't just use Google every time.
And yet thousands of users every day manage to navigate to news.ycombinator.com (n=11, at least), or wordpress.com (n=9 + the blog's name). There are massively popular blogs like overcomingbias.com, or marginalrevolution.com. I still can't spell disqus properly on first attempt, that didn't stop them.
It's important to have a good name but not crucial and it doesn't have to be short.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that "useful and readable" implies an n <= 7. Small n makes otherwise unintuitive or hard to remember things easier, but there are obviously longer "useful and readable" domains. Note, however, that while overcomingbias.com is useful, most domains in its immediate neighborhood are not. qvercomingbias.com, wvercomingbias.com, etc.
There is a growing a problem with startups finding good names, which is one of the reasons I've tried to offer personal .com naming assistance with NameMage.com. Although this isn't a sustainable long-term solution to the growing domain problem, I'm hoping this service can provide a solution for those in need right now.
Edited to add:
While there's obviously some correlation between small n and the usefulness and reasonableness of the name, my point was not primarily related to length - the parenthetical was added as an afterthought. I was simply pointing out that the overwhelming majority of sequences of letters are not going to be easy to use or remember.