Perfect .com website domain names are losing importance

Web domain names are losing importance as a vehicle for doing business successfully online.

Of course, scoring a really great .com is still something to right home about, but it isn't what it used to be. At least, this is the sentiment shared by Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and co-founder of Twitter. In his recent article, Five Reasons Domains Are Getting Less Important, Evan Williams cites five reasons that website domain names will continue to become less important.

In brief, the five reasons are:

• Google (and search engines) - Many users "locate" their destinations using Google--even to the effect that Google becomes their "uniform" resource locator--essentially users type "Facebook login" and click on the first link to login to Facebook
• Auto-completion functionality in browser address bars, which saves our brain from remembering domains
• The lack of address bars in mobile browsers due to space constraints
• Apps .. their usage is significant -- it eats into web usage and devalues domain names
• Alternate domain extensions. There are numerous success cases like: Del.icio.us, Bit.ly, turntable.fm, etc

Additionally, ICANN is planning on relaxing it's rules surrounding website domain names--allowing for more personalized domains to be created. Such domains could simply be a company's name like .starbucks or .kmart. Even if this customized domain name approach doesn't gain significant traction, it represents a direction away from the assumed mandatory .com domain extensions.