Unsurprisingly, bugbear.com is taken. Surprisingly, it features Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston and John McCarthy ( http://www.bugbear.com/roguesgallery.html ).
Bugbear.com is also not a commercial site, it is a guy's personal web presence. I would think that this would be a factor in the value of the bugbear.net name, especially for something homebrew or community oriented.
If he ever did sell to a corporate body then, of course, that would change the dynamics.
Edit: I just noticed a sibling thread talking about bugbear.com being PG's site. Just random luck on my part. Bugbear just came to mind as a defect tracking product name.
That would explain why bugbear's profile ( http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bugbear ) says "Okay just had to see if I could register it :-) Feel free to delete/lock/change pw."
While it is possible to find <foo>bug.com or even snuffle<foo>bug.com you are unlikely to find <foo> which is better than snuffle and is also available. Indeed, I'm becoming quite partial to snuffle because the word is similar to both snafu ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/SNAFU-principle.html ) and muffle; going from a very bad situation to greatly reducing unwanted side-effects.
I suppose you could choose mufflebug.com but would either of us thought of it if we hadn't seen snufflebug.com?
I've got a few pretty cool domain names. I'll give them away, to you, if your idea is good for what you want to do with it. This is also an interesting experiment in how people think about intellectual property vs. execution in the startup world.
I think a number of us would agree that good domain names help, they lend something that is easy to remember, like a jingle, and help with SEO, but the Internet is full of successful businesses with not terribly cool names. Take NewEgg. Is that from Egghead? They say not (probably for legal reasons) but there is nothing special about their name until they made it a brand. If you product is compelling enough, you could call it polished turd and it would be a success. Can anyone here come up with their favorite successful business with a crummy name?
I've always thought "Yahoo" was pretty bad. After all, the word traditionally means some uncivilized hooligan. But look where they are, now.
In any case, I think it's not so much that the name matters, but if you have a good product that people hear about frequently, the name simply becomes a few phonemes associated with that company and loses all other meaning. That's why my friends Kimmo, America, and Pooja used to have names that sounded ridiculous to me, but now the names almost seem natural as labels.
