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Ask HN: Creative TLD Use?

2 points by fuzzmeister ↗ HN
I've been working on an education-related project, and after going through the typical domain name hell, I think I've found a name: Educatious.

I've bought both Educatio.us and Educatious.com, but I thought I'd solicit some opinions on the .us domain. Is using a TLD in such a way confusing and gimmicky or cool and space-saving?

Also, feel free to comment on the name itself.

11 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] thread
brk
I'm not a big fan of "trite" urls making use of .us, .me, .foo extensions unless it's for a trivial application (ie: non commercial). Trying to tell someone "Have you used delicious?... No, DEL dot icio dot US. No, it's in the .us tld, with del. instead of www. Here, I'll write it down for you. Fuck it..."

For the education market, which IME, is not exactly at the forefront of technology understanding in a lot of cases, I wouldn't get too creative there :)

fuzzmeister
Good point, these won't be your typical del.icio.us users.
jm4
I think it's kind of lame to have a site about education with some made up variation of the word 'education' as the name. It's fine to use a made up word with no meaning. It's fine to use a play on words. It's also ok to use some completely unrelated word (like delicious or Amazon). This is a variation of a real word that carries with it the meaning of the root word, but it's the kind of word a stupid person might use while thinking it makes him sound intelligent. I don't think it's a great fit and probably doesn't convey the type of image you're going for. That's just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.
fuzzmeister
I looked for words endlessly, but I'll keep looking. My investment so far is just the (relatively cheap) domain name.
yan
If you got the .com, I don't see a reason for having the .us. It might have been cool a few years ago, but there's no substitute for you.com. I mean, keep it around as an alias just in case, but I would definitely use the .com as the primary page.
aaroneous
It has always been confusing, but now is considered gimmicky and tired.
makecheck
Considering most people think in terms of .com, and browsers let you type "xyz" to guess "xyz.com", you're really better off choosing a word that users can type without remembering where the dots go.
arockwell
Creative tlds are really confusing, don't do it. For the longest time I didn't use del.icio.us because I couldn't remember how the domain name was broken up.

I'm on the fence for the name educatious itself. Can you provide any details on what type of service is the website? I tend to prefer names that are two spelled out words or a completely made up word.

fuzzmeister
It's focused on classroom interaction, so it will be used by both teachers and students.
pclark
Educatious isn't easily spelt, I'm not really keen..
babyshake
Are you in the bay area? There's a few education startups around here you may want to know about.