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.
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.
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.
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.