Need to Stop This URL Hacki.ng — You Real.ly

Why in the world would you handicap your firm like this?

So I’m reading this story regarding ShopSocial.ly today and I’m scratching my head. The fresh social shopping web site is branding itself as ShopSocial.ly rather than ShopSocially.

Thankfully, the firm has the domain name ShopSocially.com, which it then forwards to ShopSocial.ly. But this is still a big mistake. The firm is relying on the Libyan country code to base its entire business. All of the SEO and all of the hosting points to a .ly country code domain name.

Perhaps this will give the firm a leg up when someone in Libya searches for social shopping?

Surely this move isn’t to save people from typing three extra letters (com) on the URL. It must be trying to be “cute” and piggyback on web 2.0 naming conventions.

But if I were looking to invest in this firm, the fact that its foundation is the Libya ccTLD would be one of my number one risk factors. One policy change and they could lose it overnight. (Yes, same thing for Bit.ly.)