Color's name wasn't the problem.

Worked for mint.com though. Maybe it's more appropriate for a finance service than a kewl social network. I'm sure there's some advantage for a b2b service having an official-sounding one-word domain.

I may be biased here, but I don't understand the animosity toward exact-match domain names. The claim is made that such a name is uncool, but an explanation, for why this is so, is not self-evident.

To quote Paul Graham from the article: "A company with a name like that could not have arisen organically. 'Cool.com' smells of a media conglomerate trying to create a web spinoff."

In other words, it indicates you have more money than brains.

(Apologies for going off on a tangent)

Personally I don't like domain names like cool.com or color.com because they are impossible to google. Apple is probably the exception that proves this rule.

That is a fair point, but what about product domain names, e.g. shirts.com, beer.com, etc, for companies that sell those specific product types?

If you own "shirts.com" then you definitely ought to make a website out of it. You have a huge advantage, and you should use it.

But if you were making a website to sell shirts, you might reasonably ask whether it's worth it to spend the money to buy shirts.com or to pick a more affordable name and save your money for other things. If you're a startup and shirts.com is in your reach, then you have a surprising amount of capital for a startup that hasn't launched -- why do you even have that much?

I think that's the issue at hand.

Definitely. You wouldn't buy shirts.com because the price of shirts.com is roughly equal to advantage you'd get using it, except for the fact that you had to pay upfront.

The only time you'd buy a domain like that is when the benefit you'd derive from it is greater than the price; However when the seller hears of your offer to buy it, goes to your website, finds out how much you'd benefit from the domain, the price would go up accordingly. In other words, only when the seller is clueless.

Same reason why Groupon in Australia was called "Stardeals" once upon a time, on a domain called stardeals.com.au.

Some people think this, but why then, don't we buy our shirts at shirts.com? Why do they not register on alexa/quantcast/etc?

The fact is domains like that get no real traffic unless you promote them massively. Their main worth is in selling them on to other domain whores.

Those are a great asset that can be taken advantage of by the owner. SEO is almost a cake walk. I know of HN user haploid for example who owns and runs ties.com and scarves.com for several years now. They might comment better on this matter than I can.