Five reasons why domains become less important

Recently, while discussing possible names for a product, someone asked me if the moment had arrived when the ideal domain name was no longer as important as it was before. Although I'm still a fan of short domains in .com, they already seem less important and will continue to become less and less important for at least five reasons:

1) google

There was a time when you memorized the phone numbers of your friends and family. Perhaps there was a time when you memorized the addresses of people to whom you often wrote by email. And there was a time when I knew how to get to the other end of the city without a navigator. The software took over these tasks, freeing our brains, because in this it is better than them. In this case, domain names are the same computer identifiers as phone numbers and email addresses.

If you start typing “bob” in the “To:” field in your email client, he will ask you to choose one of several Beans with which you have already corresponded, and most often this sentence turns out to be useful. If this is not the case, you are looking for an address, and then probably copy and paste it, without even paying attention to the address itself.

Many people use Google in the same way. When I first saw people open Yahoo by typing yahoo.com on Google, I was shocked. And as this famous thread in the ReadWriteWeb edition shows, in which thousands of Facebook users appeared in the article on Facebook's single login because they got there by typing in Google “facebook login” - ordinary people are guided around the entire Internet by Google. That would probably not be true if Google were not so damn fast. But it is. This is actually an autocompletion feature for the web. Well, one of them ...
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2) Auto-completion in the address bar

For slightly more sophisticated users, the auto-completion feature in the address bar of the browser saves the brain from remembering domains that they have visited once or twice. In fact, in Chrome, the search box is combined with the address bar in such an excellent way that you really do not need to remember anything.

3) Mobile browsers and hidden address bars

One of the factors that we are still worried about domains is that we see them at the top of each webpage. However, this is not so true for viewing the web in your mobile device. Due to lack of space, the address bar is often simply hidden. Also, you do not have a status bar at the bottom, which we all used to look at when hovering over a link in order to look at the domain to which it leads.

For simplicity and minimalism, Google can make the address bar hidden even in a desktop browser . (The further I write these lines, the more I’m wondering if Google has a secret plan to kill all the domains and make sure that all navigation goes through them. Note to yourself: start rumors about it.)

4) Applications

Above, I talked about using the web in phones. But another reason why many people are no longer so concerned about the issue of domains is, of course, installable applications. Personally, I am not one of those who believe that the future is associated only with applications. But it is clear that their use is quite significant, and they reduce the use of the web. Although almost every application has a website, the domain name is completely unimportant, since most applications are distributed through application stores.

5) Alternative success

And the last reason: getting the perfect .com is not so important than before, simply because others have proven that you can succeed without it. A good domain name is a sign of legitimacy. As far as I know, there was not a single serious internet project in .biz or .cc zones. Such immediately arouse suspicion. However, you have already ceased to suspect some alternative domains.

Del.icio.us was a pioneer of homonymous domains and had enough confidence among geeks (although Yahoo then still bought a serious domain because it was difficult enough to type). Bit.ly popularized the .ly zone, which is now used by a bunch of startups. About.me made the alternative zone part of its name, as well as Last.fm and the cool new project turntable.fm . (I'm sure I forgot many other examples.)

Imperfect .com domains are also still acceptable. After all, Facebook used to be on thefacebook.com. Dropbox was getdropbox.com. Although they have already managed to buy other domains, their success is obviously not based on this. 37 Signals was one of the earliest respected players who said “to hell”: the product is called Basecamp, but its domain is basecamphq.com . This kind of quality products are more and more common.

Because of these examples, expectations are changing.

I do not know what will happen with the new top-level domains, which should appear soon. I suspect that we are simply seeing more success among non-dot-coms, which opens up opportunities far more widely. This is good for creators and entrepreneurs who do not have the money to pay for the perfect .com, even if it was not used, they could find the owner and go through some cumbersome negotiations. (Shouldn't it be easier?)

Conclusion: names are more important than domains

Although a good .com still costs a lot, it doesn’t matter so much for online success as it was before. And the forces that made it less important will continue to make it even less important over time (especially related to mobile). I will still choose (and pay for) a good short .com if I find a suitable one, but I will not consider it mandatory.