Many of you reading this article are probably struggling with finding a great domain name for your business or have faced the challenge at some point. The most obvious domain names, such as furniture.com, bestwishes.com, mylife.com, have been snapped up by companies or domainers ages ago, and to reach what is left out there requires a fair amount of creative thinking. This is also the reason why web 2.0 domain names have grown increasingly popular.
To be honest, there is no clear definition what makes a domain name web 2.0. The most common criteria you may often hear is that the name should be trendy, cutting-edge and unique. Sounds ambiguous, doesn’t it? It should, because the term itself is rather intuitive and abstract; therefore, most interpretations have at least a tinge of truth in them. Nevertheless, some domain names just seem more web 2.0-ish than others.
Web 2.0 itself refers to websites that enable users to communicate with each other and generate content as opposed to web 1.0, which consists of sites that are plain information providers targeting passive readers. Web 2.0 sites include, for example, social networks, wikis, blogs and other content sharing websites. Facebook and Twitter would be the most obvious examples. Web 2.0 domain names, however, are only related to web 2.0 as much as the fact that such domain names established their popularity together with the development of web 2.0 itself. While a huge number of web 2.0 sites have a name that could be characterized as web 2.0-ish, it is not a must.
Main characteristics of web 2.0 domains
Like I said before, no one has actually established the specific characteristics of a web 2.0 name. However, everyone seems to agree that when the name does not exist as a real word, it is somehow related to web 2.0. Names such as computers.com, plasticbottle.com or coffeeandtea.com obviously do not belong to the group, but domains that look further from the plain dictionary-style could already be called web 2.0-ish.
Typical Examples:
Flickr, Google – misspelled words (flicker, googol)
Facebook, YouTube – while they are simple compounds consisting of two nouns, they had no use before the websites were established
Instagram, Pinterest – combinations of two recognizable parts of real words (instant + telegram, pinboard + interest)
Naturally, these three groups do not encompass all the possible methods of creating web 2.0 domain names. Sometimes the name could be made up from scratch (such as badoo.com) or be a real word with a metaphorical application. For example, amazon.com has essentially nothing to do with the river but the size of the Amazon is used to refer to the sales potential of the online store, which initially focused only on books. All in all, the possibilities are unlimited; you just need a bit of creativity. And of course luck.
Having clarified the essence of web 2.0 names, it would be appropriate to post an article about the simplest methods on how to generate web 2.0 domain names with the help of NameStation. Keep yourself posted!