If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).
I consult for a business with a hyphen in the name. Not recommended, as its a constant source of confusion for customers.
It might be fine for a personal site etc, but be mindful that lots of people still don't understand that websites other than .com exist (i.e. don't get a .io domain if you want to sell to the general public).
I say "dash" and I honestly rarely have issues getting folks to our page. The worse part is getting people to understand the letters over the phone (half my customers don't understand what a phonetic alphabet is so I can't just use that every time... "How do you spell Sierra?").
My boss, on the other hand, seems to have the worst time telling people about the dash. He tends to fall back on our second domain (which just redirects to the main one), and even then still has issues (I think he just talks too fast).
I recently had daily-board .com registered for a hobby project. I thought it was a fun way to represent Daily "Dash"board, but everyone I told it to was confused.
Typing a domain or having a preference for a browser, perhaps more IT in background, is a huge generational gap. EDIT as I seem to be a computer! Let me explain a recent conversation, one of several, that illustrated this. /EDIT
Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, around 60% of his client base) comment "Why no app." Most would have never have much recall of RSS.
He's 35, I'm around the same generation "Why do they need this? It's a front page and contact form, all communication then goes by email or Facebook." He said all about discovery and stickiness. Smart guy, certainly has a plan to increase stickiness with push notifications of articles/promoting his business. An interesting conversation.
It's a staccato speaking style with articles/embellishment removed, but written in text. I like the effect, personally, and use it sometimes when speaking and rarely when writing.
Often people respond with Office reference: "Why use many word when few word do trick". Amusing. Novel reference. Haven't heard before.
You have lots of small sentences, and some of them lack the words to make it a complete one.
For example, instead of starting a sentence with "Smart guy, ...", most people would write something like "He's a smart guy". Or instead of "An interesting conversation", people would write "We had many interesting conversations" or something along those lines.
Not a second language. But spent the last decade largely speaking a second (or third) language and/or with ESL speakers. Perhaps that's starting to rub-off! Oh dear.. Not sleeping right for the past few days may also be a factor. GPT-3 paranoia may also be a thing.
I think my problem is that many of your sentence fragments are not complete sentences. You keep dropping the Subject and/or Verb of the sentence.
In the above post, "But spent the last decade... ESL speakers.", you dropped the "I".
In your original post, you wrote: "Chatting with a friend that wants... not particularly technical." You dropped the "I" and the "was", and it was a long sentence, so it was difficult to figure out who was chatting and with whom.
You also leave out the commas before quotations, making it difficult to figure out who's saying what.
Another example: "He said all about discovery and stickiness." I'm still not sure what this means. Did he literally say, "all about discovery and stickiness"? Or do you mean that he said "all" (i.e. a lot of stuff) about the topic of "discovery and stickiness"? Or did you drop the "it is", and mean that he said, "It's all about discovery and stickiness."
Is your second language one of those languages where the Subject is often implicit in the context? I find that in written English, dropping the Subject and Verb does not work so well. I find it interesting that this would affect your written communication so much.
Many of my friends and most of my coworkers speak/spoke English as a second language. When speaking to them, I would find myself using simpler words and simpler grammar (e.g. simple past tense instead of past perfect progressive tense). But when writing to them, most of them can read English perfectly well, and often know the rules of English grammar better than me, so I did not have to simplify my written communication.
I mostly work and socialise with people who have English as a second language. I have noticed myself simplifying sentences a fair bit too, reducing idiom use, and so on. But perhaps not to the same extreme :)
Except that this is not true. The people you know use google, but there are many people that don't, and just type the full url or use bookmarks, and are not particularely knowledgeable about the web. If they belong to your target group, then you'll miss some visits to your website.
the argument of "everyone will Google" might as well suggest there's no reason for .com even. You could just assume the address is completely irrelevant. As long as Google knows that "Flameswipe" should go to flame-swi.pe it's fine.
As others emphasized, besides people not always using Google, it's a tragic short-term idea to defer your traffic to a search engine and all their power. You really should want people to go directly to you and not to any middle-man.
Also brings to mind my first email address, which used an underscore! In my defense, it was a hotmail address created circa 1998, before there were strong norms for such things...
> If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens.
You mean the minus sign? Few know how to type the actual unicode hyphen with the keyboard. Not to be confused with dash, but short or long one?... and here start your problems.
