[ucentric]

I think that this advice only applies to commercial sites. I have several personal domains such as Richard.sDoma.in and Richard.sMyNa.me which are far superior to any .com domain name.

Personal users are only just starting to get into having a personal URL to hosting their own id and blog etc. and with over 2 billion internet users and only around 140million registered domains, I think attitudes will change quickly. At least for the personal user.

[antileet]

Despite it being shorter, it seems more awkward to type and sometimes seems more prone to error. Not to mention how it might affect your standing with search engines.

Remember when http://delicious.com was http://del.icio.us When I first saw the product, I thought the name was "icio".

[jmreid]

Couldn't agree more. I found it awkward to type—I could never remember what part of the word 'delicious' was the domain. deli.cio.us? de.licio.us?

This is why people just go to Google and type in the domain they want. If you're off by a character or two you still get to the site without a 404.

[there]

for what it's worth, delicious was del.icio.us for 4 years and only became delicious.com 2 years after yahoo bought the site for many millions of dollars.

[semanticist]

I totally disagree, based on my experience of using semantici.st for my blog and email.

Especially for personal domains, you're going to want to tell them to people. 'Just email me, my address is whatever at richard dot s d o m a dot in.'

It's a huge chore and confuses people. These things are fine when written down, but become unworkable when you decide to go outside and interact with people. (And I don't mean that in a snarky sense - that's exactly the experience I had. It was fine while I was being reclusive and hiding in my study, but when I realised I needed to interact with other living humans outside, it's a liability.)

[ericabiz]

Totally disagree! I own a short .biz domain (erica.biz) and have had people mis-speak it when introducing me as "ericabiz.com"...so much so that I put in a backorder on ericabiz.com and when the previous registrant finally let it drop this year, I snagged it and 301'ed it to erica.biz.

I still love erica.biz and have no intentions of switching over to a .com, but there's no question that people assume you have a .com.

Search engines, however, don't care--my site happily gets tens of thousands of visitors per month from Google et.al. and the site ranks well for some very high-volume keywords.

[there]

a lot of people see .biz as a really spammy-sounding tld. i wouldn't advise any company to use it as their primary domain name.

[ericabiz]

I had one of the first .biz domains in 2001 and used it to run a 7-figure business. Back then, it was far less accepted than it is now. My blog is doing fine, too (and I get tons of compliments on the domain name!)

My point is, it sure didn't stop my company from getting hundreds of happy customers, some of whom paid us more than $10,000 per month.

[bambax]

What makes .com the best domain is CTRL+Enter: .com is the default TLD; it's like having no TLD at all.

All other TLDs, including .net, .org, .yourOwnCountry, .someExoticCountry are bad because they have to be mentioned.