.com or .net?
We chose a URL, it’s www.heyamigo.net
It wasn’t difficult to come up with this. We knew that it was HeyAmigo as soon as we thought of it. Predictably though the .com was already taken by these guys. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
Now obviously the .com would have been better but it’s not available so we were faced with a choice. Do we settle for a URL that is clearly substandard, like amigoonline.com, or gotamigo.com (apologies to those who have any URL with ‘got’ infront of it). Or we could stick with our first choice, fly in the face of fashion and hope that no-one notices, or cares that it’s not a .com.
Selfishly, we sought to gratify our own pleasures and went with the .net.
We’ve had a mixed response. The average comment is (sucking air through teeth noise) “aaaah .net?” or “I’m not sure about the .net, couldn’t you get the .com?”.
So there we have it. This one error could be the ruination of all our plans to take over the world one web app at a time. Or….people may not give a shit. Our money is on the latter.
At least it’s not a .biz or a .info!
One day all the .com’s will be owned by domain squatters and it won’t matter any more.
Comment by Pauly — May 9, 2006 @ 3:02 pm
Domain squatters - suck! Don’t they know how much they suck!
Comment by Gillian Carson — May 9, 2006 @ 5:25 pm
It depends on your market.
Users with technical knowledge will be sued to a .net
People who are not used the internet often see non .com or .co.uk as too weird, as if it’s not part of the internet or something.
But I have a .org, so who am I kidding.
Comment by James Darling — May 9, 2006 @ 8:47 pm
Tried signing up with the email and this error came up:
The requested URL /index.php was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Comment by crei0 — May 9, 2006 @ 10:46 pm
Having just lost out on a .com to squatters I can sympathize. How can they wake up and make coffee in the morning?
Comment by Erik Mallinson — May 9, 2006 @ 11:06 pm
Hi there. If you fill in your email address for heyamigo.net to be notified, there is a php error when you enter you email.
Comment by anonymous — May 9, 2006 @ 11:19 pm
I don’t think it’s that .net’s are necessarily looked down as inferior to .com - it’s that your average user doesn’t really pay attention.
Your average user doesn’t call MySpace “MySpace.com” - it’s called MySpace, everyone assumes the .com is on the end. When they enter MySpace.com, the page comes up and they are happy.
What I am afraid will happen with yours, is people will tell one another about HeyAmigo. This new potential user goes home and enter HeyAmigo.com into their browser and gets some other site.
Did the first person give this new user a good enough impression of your product for this person to go out of their way and search for HeyAmigo? Sure, for us computer nerds, a search on Google is nothing more than a few keystrokes away - but once again, for your average user, Google is out of their way and resource for finding information and/or new sites, not a resource to be used as a ‘find a website I already know about’ device.
Comment by Michael Wales — May 10, 2006 @ 5:30 am
One domain which I tried to register for a client was being squatted on and they wanted 12,000 Euro for it. Ridiculous. Client had to settle for a .biz domain instead.
Comment by Jonathan Poh — May 10, 2006 @ 5:37 am
I had the same problem when I registered 88miles.net - I missed the .com by 4 days! Very frustrating.
Unfortunately Michael is right - the .com is almost implied, but beggers can’t be choosers :(
Comment by Myles Eftos — May 10, 2006 @ 7:40 am
I just wanted to second what Michael Wales said above. I don’t really look down on .net domains, just that when I think “company name”, I go and type in “companyname.com”. Of course, sites like del.icio.us haven’t done so bad, but their users are very technical. :)
Comment by Peter Cooper — May 10, 2006 @ 9:27 am
Michael - yes we agree you certainly have a point. However the name of the app is Amigo, not HeyAmigo so there will always be a certain amount of people who will type in amigo.com anyway. And since that URL was probably registered in 1950 before the Web was invented we will always lose some customers.
We are heartened by the fact that other apps do okay with somewhat longer names like: Campfirenow.com obviously campfire.com was taken.
The alternative was to come up with a new, madeup name that meant we could snap up the .com. But we do like Amigo so!
It’s all about the marketing - we hope!
Comment by Gillian Carson — May 10, 2006 @ 11:15 am
I ran into the same issue when I tried to get my last name. Net Identity had the .com. I didn’t like .biz or the other lesser known tld’s, so I registered with Go Daddy, picked up the .co.uk. instead, and could not be happier.
Cheers!
Comment by jonto — May 10, 2006 @ 1:29 pm
.net works for me :) Did you enquire about how much the squatters are willing to let go of the .com for?
Comment by Alvin — May 11, 2006 @ 2:49 am
If it’s a mainstream app you still need .com. You also need the name of the app and the name on the logo to be the name of the .com. Otherwise this will be difficult for people to resolve.
I like the logo and I like the URL, but you will lose/miss customers with this arrangement.
Comment by smithee — May 11, 2006 @ 7:26 am
Judging from our site statistiscs, a lot of people these days use google instead of the browser’s address bar, partly due to ignorance but also because it is more forgiving to typos.
My guess is that in five to ten years, catchy domain names won’t matter half as much anymore as today
Comment by Toon — May 11, 2006 @ 10:12 am
I totally disagree, I’m afraid. We believe the majority of visitors will arrive at heyamigo.net by clicking on a link they see online or in an email, versus typing it directly into the URL box. We’ll see though …
Comment by Ryan Carson — May 12, 2006 @ 8:45 am
I totally dig the .net, it won’t matterif the product is worth while. Hey btw, come by my site at bradgarland.NET! :)
Yes, I’m biased.
Comment by Brad Garland — May 15, 2006 @ 3:49 pm
I don’t think the .com is nearly as important as it used to be. A site like del.icio.us didn’t go with the first, second, third, or fourth choice in what might be considered the standard URL heirarchy, and it paid off just fine. A useful app is a useful app, regardless of the extension.
An aside - a guy has owned ‘myname.com’ for years, hasn’t updated it since 2000, and twice has refused to sell it to me at any price. Even better - he owns it through 2012. I always feel like such a putz tell people to go to sean DASH johnson dot com…
Comment by sj — May 16, 2006 @ 3:44 pm
del.icio.us - how could they possibly go with anything else? That is just so damned clever, I still can’t get over it. I don’t think it was a matter of skipping over first, second, third or fourth choices. I think that del.icio.us had to be the first choice.
I totally dig cool things like that.
Aside: the most recent logo that I’ve seen that I just LOVE…www.trust.ru. The split “T” is cool, but when you see the “RUS” in between and realize that the company is a RUSsian one…. too cool.
Comment by David Nitzsche-Bell — May 17, 2006 @ 7:43 am
Clearly the .com domain is considered prime real estate and checking it’s availability should have been the second thing you did after fixing on the name. It costs nothing and would have taken all of 30 seconds.
But I’m not bashing you, this is an important lesson that people could learn from following your progress on this project.
Comment by Ian Sparks — June 14, 2006 @ 3:13 pm
Hi Ian,
We decided on Amigo despite the fact that we knew we had no chance of getting the domain name.
However once we decided on heyamigo as the domain we checked the .com and it was gone. We did consider changing it something else so we could have the .com but in truth we liked heyamigo so much that we just couldn’t part with it. So we went with .net
I agree that you should check if the .com is available but it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker if it’s not.
Comment by Gillian Carson — June 14, 2006 @ 3:21 pm
I was wondering if you’d considered offering to buy the .com domain name from the current owners?
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Comment by north plainfield car finance — August 27, 2006 @ 2:08 pm
I don’t really look down on .net domains, just that when I think “company name”, I go and type in “companyname.com
Comment by euro lottery results — December 18, 2006 @ 11:07 pm
I think .net will suit you just fine. It’s all in the way you market your site and most people will search for your content and get redirected by a search engine or if and when they get there will probably bookmark it if they like it having never to remember if it was a .net or a .com
Comment by Rich S — December 30, 2006 @ 3:41 am