Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names.

January 25, 2008 · Filed Under Tech

I found this great article in ITworld.com about the history of five generic domain names: milk.com , meat.com, music.com, eat.com and car.com . These would be names worth a lot in the domain real estate business but yet none of them started as what their name says, they were all geeky websites. It would be worth a lot owning one of these domains.

In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it’s almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It’s easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late ’90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early ’90s. The weird and wooly history of the Web can best be traced through some of its most generic domains. Here’s a sampling that trace the arc from the geeks to the entrepreneurs and into a more staid corporate world.

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Tags: Domain, Internet