Comments on: For Sale: Web Application – Unused

By: deltawing1

deltawing1 — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:01:31 +0000

I agree that the names are a bit ridiculous. One of the reasons for creating the silly names was because of search engine optimization (or so I heard). You make your name weird so you don’t need to compete with other websites containing the same keyword.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:14:52 +0000

By: brothercake

brothercake — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:01:05 +0000

delicious does my head in – I can never remember where the dots go, which is why I’ve never used it.

By: DevonTT

DevonTT — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:08:50 +0000

Great points all around. To build on your point about available domain names, I’d just add that businesses ought to be more concerned about their brand than their URL. Now that most people are using search engines to navigate the Web–as opposed to direct URL input–having the perfect .com name is much less important and shouldn’t be the factor that drives the brand name.

RememberTheMilk.com is a great example of filling a consumer need and naming the service–not just the URL–around its key benefit. It probably took some work and creativity to find an available domain name, but it really paid off.

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:09:04 +0000

I agree with your points about apps being too niche, and having stupid names, but I think the issue of having a viable business model is a little more complicated. The very reason that start-ups can’t try and monetize immediately is the savage competition and unforgiving users you talked about. Any site that charges money or uses adverts, is liable to be overtaken by someone who clones their app but does it for free or without adverts.

Take your example of YouTube. As I see it, they had no business plan except to make a video site that everybody used (using investor’s money), then get bought out by someone with deep enough pockets to pay their bandwidth bills and fight their legal battles. Now imagine if they’d taken a safer, more profit oriented approach, by placing ads on the site and in the videos, moderating all new content for copyright infringement, charging for certain features, etc. Would they have seen the growth and success that they did? Of course not, they’d be a bit-player and some other site, with a less restrictive model would have overtaken them.

By: cranial-bore

cranial-bore — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:08:01 +0000

Making a lovely cup of tea before the WWF smackdown finals

I had to laugh out loud at that! I think if just one grandmother can make such an announcement then twitter will have all been worthwhile!

And yes, many web apps seem to specific in their purpose to make profit in their own right. If I were CEO of an internet giant I wouldn’t be looking to plonk a heap of cash on a popular but non-selling app… but them I am the conservative type.