Recently I overheard some "non-techie" people discussing a university website, I looked over one of their shoulders, and they had written down ".edu.com". Point is, people are very familiar with the .com tld.
That said, it probably depends on your audience - if you have a great site or cater to a more tech-minded audience, it'll probably make less of a difference.
I agree, I would personally try to go with a .com simply because it is the first thing people are going to try. It's simply habit. I've been following the recent trend of country code domain usage and I believe that these are an exception to the rule IF the country code is somehow used in conjunction with the site name. People seem to remember this distinctly and disconnect it from the .com altogether solving the issue.
When you have .net, you need to market your site with .net on it, else all the traffic meant for you is going to go to .com.
Perfect example is Box.net - they have made .net as part of the branding.
I would personally not buy .net for the reasons mentioned in this thread already. Similarly, I would not have hyphens or any funny spellings in the address either. Just keep it simple, if your company is called Yahoo then yahoo.com should be where people can find about you.
Personally I rate domain hacks, especially perfect ones like last.fm. I think think the dominance of the .com should be challenged, partly because how many .coms are genuine businesses, i.e. do they make any cash, or do they just lose it hand over fist - shouldn't there be a .fail TLD ?
I know there's lot's of issues with hacks like this, but still think they're worth exploring and are a neat way of bypassing the speculative purchasing of .com names.
Try www.domaintyper.com for some neat domain name choices.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] threadhowever, devver.net (from the techstars incubator) has a .net, so thats not to say it isnt done.
That said, it probably depends on your audience - if you have a great site or cater to a more tech-minded audience, it'll probably make less of a difference.
When you tell someone the name of your company they're going to go to .com first - and if you don't own that its going to look strange.
The real exception are sites which make creative use of country code domains like bit.ly or del.icio.us
I know there's lot's of issues with hacks like this, but still think they're worth exploring and are a neat way of bypassing the speculative purchasing of .com names.
Try www.domaintyper.com for some neat domain name choices.