8 ms·

Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain

35 points by foxhop 13y ago

piratebroadcast 13y ago
If the Admin is here, The very bottom ones (00.com, for example) should display upwards on hover, not downwards below the footer where it can't be seen.
japaget 13y ago
This doesn't list all possible two-letter domains, just the .com's. There are others, such as uc.edu, ti.org, and 13.tv.
- WilliamSt 13y ago
  Yep, I thought I was going to find my own domain here.
brittohalloran 13y ago
Incredible how many of these are not being utilized
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Amazing how 80% is crap.
- hnriot 13y ago
  Isn't that true in general, 80% of tv is crap, 80% of photography, 80% of twitter/tumblr is crap, 80% of music is crap (country!), 80% of every human endeavor is crap.
  - pluies_public 13y ago
    Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law
  - Napapijri 13y ago
    80% is probably on on the low side though...
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    Yeah, I was invoking Pareto. In other words, amazing how an apparently arbitrary sample ("domains with 2 letters"), as opposed to a random one, reflects the population's crappiness.
  - badclient 13y ago
    Not necessarily. 80% of anything might be crap for you but much higher than 80% of anything is not see as crap on the whole. You might hate country but tons of people love it. Contrast with crappy domains: they are crap for everyone except may be the owner.
  - tincholio 13y ago
    I think you're underestimating how crappy all of those things are with your 80% figure...
simonster 13y ago
Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site.
- wepple 13y ago
  Also, running a query on localhost returns an nginx banner
  - deanpcmad 13y ago
    That would depend on the server you have installed on localhost
    - wepple 13y ago
      no I mean if you run a query via their site for 'localhost' they take a snapshot of localhost, their own server. As in: https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&token=d9f279b0aa29893db91e11b826d8d914&size=420x200 https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&t...
ctdonath 13y ago
Any rules against punctuation in a 2-character domain?
- duskwuff 13y ago
  A domain name component can't start or end with a dash, so it's effectively disallowed.
mdotk 13y ago
Can view the image of one, then subsequent hovers don't load
cmapes 13y ago
Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them, just like many other potentially useful domain names online. I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at domain squatters.
- toyg 13y ago
  I often have the opposite experience: there is a surprisingly large number of available good domains out there. With the proliferation of relaxed TLDs (.tv, .io, .ly etc, and now even more with the new arbitrary TLDs) domain squatting looks like a much less profitable activity than it was in the 90s.
- bratsche 13y ago
  Yeah, it's frustrating. There's a domain that I wanted, and the guy who's got it has been squatting on it for years and years. So I contacted him about it about 3 years ago and he said: "Thank you for your interest. The web site is under extensive development and is not for sale. Only a (1) public company or (2) private company with sales in excess of $5B would be considered." First of all, that website looks the same now as it did 10 years ago. So I'm not sure what "extensive development" means. And second of all, why would it be any of his concern whether my company is public or makes $5B in sales? That really rubbed me the wrong way. I'd rather just get back a ridiculous number that I'm obviously not going to pay.
  - pavlov 13y ago
    If it's a good domain, you're certainly not the only one who contacted him about the domain just out of curiosity. He's getting a lot of emails about it. If he did what you suggest and replied to everyone with a ridiculous price -- "Hi, USD 20 million, ok?" -- then he'd just get a second wave of emails from people trying to haggle: "That's outrageous! The domain is worth $100k maximum. I'll pay you $2k and give you 0.1% equity in my awesome startup. Deal?" And if he doesn't reply to that, then the person will send another email with the worthless offer slightly tweaked, and so on... So he's better off setting a precondition that prevents the pointless replies, basically "I'll talk to you only if you have a legal department with more than 20 people."
ternaryoperator 13y ago
It's actually only two-letter (and digit) .com domains.
adventured 13y ago
Much like when I go hunting for a good .com for a new project, it's mildly depressing to see how many of those two letter domains are rather going to waste.
wyager 13y ago
There are some weird and strangely compelling sites on that list. I went on a very strange journey through some of those sites, and I found a chat room evidently operated by some secretive domain-squatting millionaire filled with a motley crew of famous shock site operators and random bored folks stumbling across two-letter domains. The internet still manages to surprise me sometimes.
- jtreminio 13y ago
  http://99.com http://99.com ?
  - wyager 13y ago
    Yep.
drum 13y ago
I don't like how the popup after you hover on a link covers the links horizontally to the right. It forces you to move the mouse away, wait for the popup to dismiss, and then move the mouse over the next link. Maybe move the popups below the current row of links.
- richardkiss 13y ago
  Like how lnkvu.com works?
snide 13y ago
I used to be a product/design guy at CNET in their games division. My team was working on one of the biggest initiatives for the company, launching a new site with a pretty small team of engineers (think it was 6, we had no editorial team, just some recent hires for data entry). In any case, we'd been working on it for 5 months or so, really grueling work, but we were young and excited about building something with so much potential. One month before the actual launch someone came up to me and said, "hey, we need you to move the launch date up two weeks". The reason was pretty boring, the usual executive needs it for X, and as you'd imagine nobody was very excited about it. So all the engineers are stuck in a cramp little meeting room bitching about how many extra hours we'd have to put in to get it done. Eventually I laughed and said "Well, no one in this room will ever work on a two-letter domain again. That's probably reason enough. At least we get to say we launched one." 8 years later I still think about that day. I've had a pretty wild career, but yep, I doubt I'll ever get to build another TV.com. Anyways, that's my tiny anecdote about a two letter domain! Worked with a lot of good people on it and still work with some of them. It's a pretty different site now, but right out of the gate it was huge and had tons and tons of community contributions to its episode guides, storing everything in a nice structured data style. These days all I think is... man, we could have done so much more with it (we should have put an API out for the data at least). From what I understand, Google's sidebar related data search results have slowly been biting at into the traffic of large wiki repositories like TV.com and IMDB over the past couple years.
- werid 13y ago
  I bet tvrage.com (started in june 2005) eventually stole a lot of traffic from tv.com, i have vague memories of a redesign by tv.com which broke old links, and was not very usable.
  - snide 13y ago
    tvrage at least as I remember it was built from a crawl from tv.com data. But yeah, I left the product 6 months after launch and since then it's been in a dozen different hands and a bunch of redesigns, most moving the focus towards quick news and away from the wiki. Such is the way of the web.
mstrem 13y ago
I once looked at do.com a few years back. It was owned by Microsoft, and I thought they wont release that domain unless you pay them a hefty amount of money. Someone apparently did. Unless...
- srom 13y ago
  Salesforce did. http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-another-great-domain-and-launches-site-com-today/ http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-ano...
foxhop 13y ago
follow up post- Firework Project Screenshot evert two-letter Domain: http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-two-letter-domain.html http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-t...

35 points by foxhop 13y ago

If the Admin is here, The very bottom ones (00.com, for example) should display upwards on hover, not downwards below the footer where it can't be seen.

japaget 13y ago

This doesn't list all possible two-letter domains, just the .com's. There are others, such as uc.edu, ti.org, and 13.tv.

WilliamSt 13y ago
Yep, I thought I was going to find my own domain here.

brittohalloran 13y ago

Incredible how many of these are not being utilized

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

Amazing how 80% is crap.

hnriot 13y ago
Isn't that true in general, 80% of tv is crap, 80% of photography, 80% of twitter/tumblr is crap, 80% of music is crap (country!), 80% of every human endeavor is crap.
- pluies_public 13y ago
  Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law
- Napapijri 13y ago
  80% is probably on on the low side though...
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  Yeah, I was invoking Pareto. In other words, amazing how an apparently arbitrary sample ("domains with 2 letters"), as opposed to a random one, reflects the population's crappiness.
- badclient 13y ago
  Not necessarily. 80% of anything might be crap for you but much higher than 80% of anything is not see as crap on the whole. You might hate country but tons of people love it. Contrast with crappy domains: they are crap for everyone except may be the owner.
- tincholio 13y ago
  I think you're underestimating how crappy all of those things are with your 80% figure...

simonster 13y ago

Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site.

wepple 13y ago
Also, running a query on localhost returns an nginx banner
- deanpcmad 13y ago
  That would depend on the server you have installed on localhost
  - wepple 13y ago
    no I mean if you run a query via their site for 'localhost' they take a snapshot of localhost, their own server. As in: https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&token=d9f279b0aa29893db91e11b826d8d914&size=420x200 https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&t...

ctdonath 13y ago

Any rules against punctuation in a 2-character domain?

duskwuff 13y ago
A domain name component can't start or end with a dash, so it's effectively disallowed.

mdotk 13y ago

Can view the image of one, then subsequent hovers don't load

cmapes 13y ago

Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them, just like many other potentially useful domain names online. I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at domain squatters.

toyg 13y ago
I often have the opposite experience: there is a surprisingly large number of available good domains out there. With the proliferation of relaxed TLDs (.tv, .io, .ly etc, and now even more with the new arbitrary TLDs) domain squatting looks like a much less profitable activity than it was in the 90s.
bratsche 13y ago
Yeah, it's frustrating. There's a domain that I wanted, and the guy who's got it has been squatting on it for years and years. So I contacted him about it about 3 years ago and he said: "Thank you for your interest. The web site is under extensive development and is not for sale. Only a (1) public company or (2) private company with sales in excess of $5B would be considered." First of all, that website looks the same now as it did 10 years ago. So I'm not sure what "extensive development" means. And second of all, why would it be any of his concern whether my company is public or makes $5B in sales? That really rubbed me the wrong way. I'd rather just get back a ridiculous number that I'm obviously not going to pay.
- pavlov 13y ago
  If it's a good domain, you're certainly not the only one who contacted him about the domain just out of curiosity. He's getting a lot of emails about it. If he did what you suggest and replied to everyone with a ridiculous price -- "Hi, USD 20 million, ok?" -- then he'd just get a second wave of emails from people trying to haggle: "That's outrageous! The domain is worth $100k maximum. I'll pay you $2k and give you 0.1% equity in my awesome startup. Deal?" And if he doesn't reply to that, then the person will send another email with the worthless offer slightly tweaked, and so on... So he's better off setting a precondition that prevents the pointless replies, basically "I'll talk to you only if you have a legal department with more than 20 people."

ternaryoperator 13y ago

It's actually only two-letter (and digit) .com domains.

adventured 13y ago

Much like when I go hunting for a good .com for a new project, it's mildly depressing to see how many of those two letter domains are rather going to waste.

wyager 13y ago

There are some weird and strangely compelling sites on that list. I went on a very strange journey through some of those sites, and I found a chat room evidently operated by some secretive domain-squatting millionaire filled with a motley crew of famous shock site operators and random bored folks stumbling across two-letter domains. The internet still manages to surprise me sometimes.

jtreminio 13y ago
http://99.com http://99.com ?
- wyager 13y ago
  Yep.

drum 13y ago

I don't like how the popup after you hover on a link covers the links horizontally to the right. It forces you to move the mouse away, wait for the popup to dismiss, and then move the mouse over the next link. Maybe move the popups below the current row of links.

richardkiss 13y ago
Like how lnkvu.com works?

snide 13y ago

I used to be a product/design guy at CNET in their games division. My team was working on one of the biggest initiatives for the company, launching a new site with a pretty small team of engineers (think it was 6, we had no editorial team, just some recent hires for data entry). In any case, we'd been working on it for 5 months or so, really grueling work, but we were young and excited about building something with so much potential. One month before the actual launch someone came up to me and said, "hey, we need you to move the launch date up two weeks". The reason was pretty boring, the usual executive needs it for X, and as you'd imagine nobody was very excited about it. So all the engineers are stuck in a cramp little meeting room bitching about how many extra hours we'd have to put in to get it done. Eventually I laughed and said "Well, no one in this room will ever work on a two-letter domain again. That's probably reason enough. At least we get to say we launched one." 8 years later I still think about that day. I've had a pretty wild career, but yep, I doubt I'll ever get to build another TV.com. Anyways, that's my tiny anecdote about a two letter domain! Worked with a lot of good people on it and still work with some of them. It's a pretty different site now, but right out of the gate it was huge and had tons and tons of community contributions to its episode guides, storing everything in a nice structured data style. These days all I think is... man, we could have done so much more with it (we should have put an API out for the data at least). From what I understand, Google's sidebar related data search results have slowly been biting at into the traffic of large wiki repositories like TV.com and IMDB over the past couple years.

werid 13y ago
I bet tvrage.com (started in june 2005) eventually stole a lot of traffic from tv.com, i have vague memories of a redesign by tv.com which broke old links, and was not very usable.
- snide 13y ago
  tvrage at least as I remember it was built from a crawl from tv.com data. But yeah, I left the product 6 months after launch and since then it's been in a dozen different hands and a bunch of redesigns, most moving the focus towards quick news and away from the wiki. Such is the way of the web.

mstrem 13y ago

I once looked at do.com a few years back. It was owned by Microsoft, and I thought they wont release that domain unless you pay them a hefty amount of money. Someone apparently did. Unless...

srom 13y ago
Salesforce did. http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-another-great-domain-and-launches-site-com-today/ http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-ano...

foxhop 13y ago

follow up post- Firework Project Screenshot evert two-letter Domain: http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-two-letter-domain.html http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-t...