That's debatable: a good (generic) domain could give instant recognition in a given market (think Blinds.com), make things easier for you "easy" on Google, easier to remember, and even easier opportunities for branding your service. Granted, only the domain name doesn't do the trick.
It sucks when it happens, but it's good to remind ourselves that it could happen. Mostly because we'll keep starting new companies all our lives (or so it seems).
IBM didn't get the PC, so they lost relevance. Microsoft didn't get the web, so they lost relevance. Both are still huge companies, grossing billions a year (but hit on their valuation by the public market). Maybe in 10 years we'll be saying "google didn't get social", so they lost their relevance. Would that be the case? Only time will tell.
The concept is interesting, no doubt about it. More and more activities are outsourced (your hosting, your WP site, your customer service, your landing page optimization, etc, etc). When it comes to selling, mostly B2B as they mention, I believe there are long funnels in order to get new customers to pay the bills. Let's see how the concept evolves. Good luck!
I believe social networking is here to stay. Advertising dollars follow where the audience is. Off line advertising is losing ad dollars year over year to follow where the people are. Today, they're online. Imagine in 10 years...
Facebook in particular, the largest player in the social networking arena by far, has a huge opportunity before their eyes. Wait for them to start executing on them. I "only" see 2 big ones: advertising and search. Yeah, I know, many people are talking about it. But that's true. FB knows everything about most of their users (600mm people), so how long until they create a competing Adsense service? Not far I think. That's a $10bn a year, at least, for FB in the next 5 years or less. Search is another opportunity that's so huge I can't even think of the size of that market.
Ideally, Programming Questions -> StackOverflow | Business Questions -> Startups.com. Online communities are, in a way, like physical spaces (bar, restaurants, etc). You like one over the other for different reasons: maybe the music, the drinks, the food, the host, maybe your friends hang out there. We'll see how this plays out. Competition is always good because it forces you to think more and more about how to server your customers/visitors better.
hopefully we'll be able to find the best mix for our audience. We launched 4 days ago, and we're happy with the traction we're getting. Of course there are tons of little details to polish, but hey, did you expect something different for a startup? :)
Our thoughts exactly. We didn't mention the killerstartups.com name because we thought it was more appropiate (mabye it wasn't a good idea.) KillerStartups.com was launched in January 2007 and it's getting a good number of visitors per day (90k). And yes, we did pay mid-six figures for Startups.com (ouch :)
You're right, our fault. I just posted a comment and mentioned it a bit about us. We're internet entrepreneurs from latinamerica, that have build a few successful startups over the last ten years.
Thanks Joel for posting about Startups.com. Awesome to make it here, and it seems there are quite a few people interested on the site. When it comes to design, it's really a subjective issue. We ran some tests and this one came out as the winner. We're tarteting a broad group of people interested in "business" in general, not only on startups. We'll see how it goes. We're the people behind KillerStartups.com, internet entrepreneurs at heart. Matias de Tezanos, currently founder and CEO of HealthCare.com (sold Hoteles.com to Hotels.com back in the day, raised $10M for HealtCare.com, Inc. and funded several other startups), and Gonzalo Arzuaga, who sold GauchoNet to Terra/Lycos in 1999, and wrote 5 books about business on the internet (unfortunately, in spanish)