Why The Domain "Poo.Com" ?
Fine, let's deal with this one first as it is one of the most commonly asked questions
within the
chat.
The real answer is that is wasn't just Poo.Com and still isn't the only domain to point to
the chat application.
That said, it is one of the original domains and the most well known of those that still do.
The fact is our chat site has been known by many people, under many names and was reachable
through many domains.
To mention a handful of the most memorable and iconic domains of the chat's history:
-
Smile.com
-
99.com
-
Sexy.com
-
Truth.org
-
Man.com
-
Fist.com
With the full list being more than 250 domains as mentioned here:
Poo.com Chat
Domains
(originally posted
in 2003).
However it should be noted (a mere 15+ years later) that several wrong assumptions were made
in the first section of that page.
For example the domains were always intended as long term investments, with few even being
sold on either side of the Dot Com Bubble and for those that were, it was
usually a reluctant sale.
However, back in the late 90's domain parking was still in its infancy and needed time to
mature. In the meantime there were many domains waiting to be pointed to "something" and
that something over time became a chat application that was like no other.
Archive.Org Inconsistencies
Because there was a period of time when our chat application only supported the IE web
browser.
Archive.org's crawlers would have been detected as non-IE and therefore redirected to a
parked page during this phase of the chat's history.
Weighing Up The Pros And Cons
In summary, we should consider that this kind of experiment will very likely never happen on
the internet again. Especially with such prime, high calibre domains as the ones that have
been used through our chat's history.
As was mentioned on the Welcome page, no one can deny the uniqueness of
Poo.Com's history and given that no one is likely to try this again, on such a scale. Let us
share some of the Pros and Cons.
It is worth remembering that this was at a time when search engines were still young (MSN
and Yahoo just five years old and Google only two years old) and much less used. So type-in
traffic was much greater than it is today.
Pros
Lots of direct visitors.
There were always many different people with different interests, as they would be
typing in random words for domain names and landing on our chat.
Many indirect visitors.
As one of the domains for the chat was man.com, we would often get a decent amount of
people that would mistype "msn.com". As well as a good amount of Chinese users
misreading "qq.com" as 99.com. As Bob Ross would say, "happy little accidents".
Cons
Costly.
It is obviously expensive to have so many domains pointing to one site.
Especially a chat site that does not run any advertisements.
Divided user base.
Some of these domains are clearly VERY desirable to other people on the internet
and it is just a matter of time before some large company comes along with an offer that
can't be refused. As was the case with 99.Com not so long ago.
We have therefore sadly lost more chatters from our network than most sites could ever
hope to gain.