I think the standard thing to do would be to get a dotcom, even if you have to be creative with the name. But there have been successes with non-dotcoms:
That's two. ;) And I'd argue that bit.ly has a special advantage in the confusing-silly-suffix department, being a service that appeals mostly to (a) relatively sophisticated people who know about URLs -- they know what URLs are, and they know that a short URL is better, and they know that one URL can redirect to another -- and (b) robots that shorten URLs automatically and that are very good at remembering arbitrary rules.
Can we name any other prominent examples of non-dot-com stardom? The poster child of the cutesy URL movement, delicio.us, dropped the idea halfway through its rise to, um, near-death and relative obscurity at the hands of Yahoo. So I'm not sure they're a very promising example. Any other big stars? What am I missing?
Can we name any other prominent examples of non-dot-com stardom? The poster child of the cutesy URL movement, delicio.us, dropped the idea halfway through its rise to, um, near-death and relative obscurity at the hands of Yahoo. So I'm not sure they're a very promising example. Any other big stars? What am I missing?