What’s in a Domain? A Tale of Obsession

Domain names - the right domain names - are big business so I’m told. Like the early days of the gold rush, prospectors swept in during the late 90’s and snapped up anything vaguely intelligible, their eyes lit up with the promise of thousands upon thousands of dollars resulting from their meager intellectual investment. Today, the pickings are slim - you need only look at the crazy, misspelled or simply made up names of today’s web apps and properties to see that - who would ever have imagined using something called Twitter, YouTube or Google 15 years ago?

And so it was that last week I found myself looking for a domain name. The right domain name. It started off simply enough - I wanted to migrate thunderberry.com to a US based registrar, and to finally register kevinrochowski.com (I’d never even thought of registering it until now - oddly enough, it was still available). I had chosen to use Dotster, which whilst not the cheapest registrar seems to have enough good buzz for me to trust them. I went through the process of transferring my domain, registered the vanity domain… and then my brain started ticking.

I’ve been making use of twitter quite a bit lately, and have some good ideas for for services to go with it. Since I was already registering domains, why not be a little preemptive and come up with some names? It was slow going at first. Most of the easily conceivable combinations with “twitter” and “tweet” had already been taken. Time to think outside of the box a little. What about misspellings? Or something suggestive of the function? Could it be used as a verb? Finally I starting coming upon decent names that were still available.

Within a few hours I already had tweethernet.com, whispyr.com and tweetgenie.com. I paid my 15 dollars per domain and sat back. I still wanted more. What other permutations were there? twitteral.com, twitterfication.com, twitterfixation.com - they all found their way into my shopping cart. I needed to stop. But I was hooked. Then came twitterocracy.com, and more and more… finally, enough was enough. It was like a session of blackjack, putting out those small, innocuous 15 dollar chips on the table and never knowing if they’ll bring you any returns. But it was time to cash my chips.

So having splurged out a little to claim my pieces of web real estate, now what? I suspect a number of my purchased will never amount to anything, and so I have set them to expire after a year if I don’t do anything. But for several of my properties, more interesting fates await. A little exploration, a little deal making… and then finally they’ll be introduced to the world. In some ways it’s a gamble is the true sense of the word - I don’t intend to make money out of this, but I do certainly intend to have fun.