Thank you for subscribing to the third issue of Fresh Insights (delivered 10 June 2011, subscribe to get it fresh). Read on for the latest in domains and tech.
Domaining
.SO Domains
The Somalian .SO top-level domain has been available for registration since 1 April 2011 @ $13/year. All the dictionary words like virtuo.so are taken, but there are some really great domains still available.
How To Choose The Perfect Domain For Your Brand
Branding a domain name is a trade-off between self-explanation and uniqueness, e.g. softdrinks.com vs cocacola.com. The best brand in a crowded market should return zero search results on Google and hint at the product or service behind it.
I draft all my newsletters with DraftEssay.com, a side-project of mine that lets you draft documents online and invite others to make in-line annotations. The brand itself is self-explanatory and could even be memorable, but if you Google "draft essay", 20 million competing search results smother my direct-matching .COM domain. It's a bad domain brand.
Luckily, I realised this early on, so I partnered with respected French Designer Sacha Greif to build a better version 2.0 and selected a better brand: Cowritable, a portmanteau of "collaborative writing".
I am particularly proud of this domain because despite its memorability, there were exactly zero search results for the term "cowritable" when I registered it on 24 April. Now all 1,080 Google search results are about Cowritable's viral marketing campaign and we are #1, before it has even launched. That's a brandable domain name.
Brandability, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. We assessed 48 good, available domain names on over 10 criteria before we settled on Cowritable with a public poll.
Headlines
Is Groupon Insolvent?
Groupon is losing $117M per quarter despite revenues of $644M, writes David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals (@dhh). While Jose Ferreira argues that Groupon is a straight-up Ponzi Scheme, others report that Groupon is declining in Boston and that 75% of customers do not return. The business model is unsustainable; I'd short.
LinkedIn Share Price Falling
LinkedIn share price is back down to ~$72 per share and falling. Maybe it wasn't underpriced after all. Too bad it's so expensive to short :(.
Speculations
Google Heading for Antitrust Lawsuit
Consider the following:
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What if content from one company dominated Google's search results?
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What if this company provided all the videos, maps, places, weather and flight search results in search results?
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What if this company was owned by Google? Wait. I'll let you Google that.
If this was Microsoft, the FTC would be going bat crazy. Google refuses to display 3rd party search results within its search results, but has no problem displaying video searches, flight searches, price comparisons and weather forecasts from properties it owns. Serious antitrust lawsuit on the way, because despite denying it, Google is already a content company.
Stay Tuned
Stay tuned for next week's insights.
Best
Petrus
freshcode.co
@FreshCode