If you have a unique business plan or web development idea that can’t easily or quickly be replicated, the domain name you choose for your website hardly matters. You can be  CrazyCrazyCrazy.us or some other funky domain name, and you will still have success if there’s a strong market for your product or service. The domain name matters much less than the idea and execution.

If your idea isn’t completely unique or you are entering a market where there is considerable competition, the domain name can be critical to your company’s success or failure.

In just about every market, a new industry leader can emerge (or  a new company can instantly be competitive) if he has the category killer domain name for the industry, as long as his product is at least competitive with the industry leaders. The company doesn’t necessarily need to be innovative to gain market share – just competitive.

New companies need to be innovative to take market share away from the leaders, or they need to spend considerable sums of money on marketing to get consumers to think its products are better or to give them a reason to buy them over its competitors products. A domain name doesn’t necessarily do all of this, but the category killer domain name does convey trust and is instantly recognizable.

Torah.com may not be the best looking website yet, as it’s a work in progress. However, I receive many Jewish-related questions every week from people who think Torah.com is the expert. I may not be from Lowell or have the most comprehensive site about Lowell (it’s debatable), but hundreds of people still visit Lowell.com each day, and many people book their hotel reservations right on the site.

A new company can spend a lot of money on marketing to convey trust. A category defining domain name can be expensive, but it can give instant credibility to a new or rebranded company.

Twitter has been down for the past few hours, the result of a denial of service attack, according to an article on CNET. Although this must be frustrating to avid Twitter users and Twitter employees, this outage could end up being a very good thing for the company.

I haven’t dug in to my Google Analytics account this morning, but I would bet my traffic is down (on my blog and on my geodomain names). Generally after I post an article on my blog, I post an update on Twitter to let my followers know that there’s a new article. Within a few minutes, people begin to post comments, and I can tell that many of them saw the link via Twitter and visited my blog as a result. This hasn’t happened yet.

Needless to say, with a Twitter outage, I am sure that a lot of websites are seeing a significant impact to their traffic. Some sites may even see a loss of revenue as a result of the Twitter outage. All of this will make companies realize how important Twitter is to their bottom line, and may shed some light on ways to generate revenue for the yet to be profitable venture.

In a private move, Microsoft has acquired the domain name Office.com for a yet to be disclosed sum. Perhaps this figure will be disclosed in a future SEC filing.

Sometime between May 19 and May 23, 2009, a company called Marksmen, a Microsoft contractor according to ComputerWorld, took possession of the domain name. On August 4th, the domain name was transferred to Microsoft’s account, according to Whois information.

There is a note on the Office.com website advising customers that the company formerly operating on Office.com will no longer be operating on that domain name:

As you know from the recent email we sent you, we will be transitioning the operation of your Virtual Office account to ContactOffice.com during the next 30 days.

As part of this transition, on Monday, June 29, 2009, we changed email addresses in the office.com domain to ones in the contactoffice.com domain.

That said, it looks like Microsoft made a smart strategic move and will begin to use Office.com for it’s Microsoft Office suite of products in lieu of its current office.microsoft.com url. It will be interesting to see if there will be any significant changes to the operation of the website and interactivity on it, or if its simply a branding decision to enhance the company’s online presence.