Just filter out everything except .com, and have a scan through. Hundreds of names drop each day. Minimum cost is $10 + reg fee, which is another $10 per year.
Right now I can see these dropping today, with no takers yet:
Not all the good ones are gone, but it's certainly getting increasingly hard to find a sensible ___domain name. What worked for me recently is although I couldn't find a ___domain name that wasn't taken, I found a good one that was registered but isn't in use, then used the coarse expedient of offering the owner a few hundred quid for it.
My main concern is that most of the domains are ending up owned by a very few individuals concerned only with slapping cheap advertising on them. I refuse to attempt to buy domains from these bottom feeders, and I would suggest that everyone else do likewise. However, it's an increasing problem that's going to require either the advertising industry or ICANN to crack down on one of these days.
A 5 or 6 letter ___domain name isn't necessarily significantly better than a, say, 7 or 8 letter ___domain name. twitter.com is much better than twtr.com or similar.
The trick nowadays, unless you want some unpronounceable nonsense, is to conjoin two words in some way. Let's assume your site's main topic / product / quality is "widgets." You could go with things like: gowidgets, widgetstoday, hotwidgets, redwidgets, widgetman, widgetway, widgetinside, widgetwise.. you'll find a significant amount of domains with this technique that are free to register. It does take a lot of thinking and testing to find something that's good though! You can't just join anything.
That kind tend to be more forgettable precisely because there are so many combinations of words. For example, it's been a decade or so and I still don't remember if a given office supply store is Office Max or Office Depot. But I do know if it's a Staples or not.
That's the job of branding. Microsoft, Slashdot, Burger King, Coca Cola, TechCrunch, General Motors, Morgan Stanley and Mercedes Benz aren't particularly forgettable (even though Microsoft is about as generic as it gets!)
I'm not sure there are significantly more successful single word brands than longer named brands, although it certainly seems to be true online.
5-letter doesn't necessarily mean good. For instance, the 5-letter domains mentioned by kleevr in another post (kleevr.com, kratr.com, rabyt.com, exphi.com, excyt.com, xcytr.com, zroone.com, onezro.com, grabyt.com) might be nice and geeky, but good luck trying to get someone to remember them.
There's plenty of good stuff in 6/7-letters. I recently registered flails.org for an open-source project, and my latest business runs on Woobius.com. Both are clear and easy to remember (and, we reckon, not lame).
I think domains themselves will be old news before too long anyways. I think OpenDNS is working on some cool ideas in the area.
I bought a ___domain like CarTrust.com for about $400, wanted to build a site to fix the 'how to find a good mechanic' problem, but recently realized car care wasn't a core passion of mine, so I passed the ___domain on to someone else. I'd spend at least two weeks playing on registrars before checking out the auctions, because if you work at it long enough I'm positive you'll find something you like that's unregistered.
Pretty much all of the generic, single/double words and three character domains are gone (and the people who own them are making $$$), but I've still found some good ones by adding two words together and being creative. It's just a little harder today than it was in 1999.
I know that marketing types tell us to ignore everything except .com, but is that still valid in 2008? There are a kajillion of TLDs available for global registration now, and many have lots of English-word domains available.
I had one ___domain name I wanted for my personal site, and the .com was taken (and not even available for an extortionate amount despite that there was only advertising on there), so I got that name .org and .net.
Unless people knew/looked up my address from an email or business card, people kept going to the .com address..and sent email to the .com address as well and got "no such address" replies back. Then they'd call me up or something and bother me about it. Even my mom sent emails to the .com address.
Eventually I gave up and got another name that ended in .com, and I haven't had problems yet. Plus, it's something fairly memorable (if you know me) and also the first few google results for the name :D
I suppose the big problem is that even with the big name sites (del.icio.us comes to mind), some people have a hard time remembering "delicious" as being del.icio.us and instead go to delicious.com (I think I even heard something about them changing the main site address to .com...edit: it was from a TC article about the new preview.). It's been too ingrained into people's heads. It's probably not going to change anytime soon.
edit the second because it just popped up in my head: I might note this probably depends on where you live (or more specifically, where your visitors live). .com seems to be the default TLD people think of (sometimes the only one) in the US. Meanwhile it's not necessarily the case e.g. in South Korea, where .co.kr is just as well known as .com, et cetera.
edit the third because I haven't fully woken up yet (although it's 1pm PDT): I'm the general computer person for a small nonprofit in Southern California. We have a .org address, and you'd imagine it would be appropriate to use a .org address and that people would remember it. Nope. We're now considering buying the .com and redirecting to the .org because people have trouble associating a .org with an organization.
The problem I have with those del.icio.us type urls is that I have a really hard time remembering where the dots go.
Way back when del.icio.us was just getting popular, someone told me about it. When I got home, I tried "delicio.us", "delicious.com", "de.licio.us", etc. Had to resort to googling to find the place.
Also, you have "con.nect.us", but who has "connect.us"? I think they'll be getting a lot of your traffic...
It's not always about size. Sometimes it's about memorability. I think we're way past the point of "web 2.0"-y names being memorable (though some will still make it out of obfuscation).
Take a word or two that work well with your idea. There are millions of these small combinations out there.
I've used http://pickydomains.com a few times. You pay $50 and provide information on what you're looking for (names you like, etc.). They brainstorm names. If they find one you like, they keep the money. Otherwise, they refund it. We used them when brainstorming Tumblon (http://tumblon.com) and Zencoder (http://zencoder.tv). In both cases, they didn't come up with the final name we used, but they came close and gave us some inspiration for our final name. Most of the suggestions aren't any good, but when you get 100+ suggestions, a few are usually worthwhile.
There are places like Namejet you can use to know when "good" names are expiring also.
Personally, I think that people give too much merit to the short ___domain names. There is some value to a 4-6 letter ___domain name, but it's not the be-all/end-all.
Names are out there, but you just have to be a bit more creative about picking them. You also need to be a bit more flexible about what you're willing to accept in having a ___domain that 'has bad spelling' or other quirks.
I think there are a fair amount of 5 letter domains out there yet. (here are the few 5-6 I've registered: kleevr.com, kratr.com, rabyt.com, exphi.com, excyt.com, xcytr.com, zroone.com, onezro.com, grabyt.com)
Whether these qualify as 'good domains' might be in the eye of the beholder, but I like them and have pretty good ideas sketched up for most of them.
"Just" and a "few years ago" don't really mesh :) And jrock is 5 letters! Sorry if this is coming off differently than I mean it--I just think this comment is funny.
A lot of them are gone, which is what you get when you make the cost of registering a ___domain pretty much free. IMHO it'd be far better to make the cost of registering a ___domain a few hundred dollars a year.
As it is you can just register domains, slap advertising on them, and you make a slow profit.
Nothing left. It's the end of the internet. In a few years every person and machine on earth will have a couple of web pages. A public one for professional use and a private one for friends and family only.
We'll have to address by content, not by name. Search engines are the future, baby!
And projectpath.com (among other choices) for the actual Basecamp account. It doesn't even have the name in it! But it doesn't need to.
Having the commonly used name isn't always a great idea anyway. You might want to avoid python.com (NSFW), for example. But the Python folks could have easily gotten codepython./com|net|org/
A good tool is this, look at the tdnam expiring list: http://www.freshdrop.net/expiring_names.php
Just filter out everything except .com, and have a scan through. Hundreds of names drop each day. Minimum cost is $10 + reg fee, which is another $10 per year.
Right now I can see these dropping today, with no takers yet:
waffly.com zanze.com upbreak.com tibbu.com serific.com foxtrots.com frankable.com measurably.com
It's a gold mine!
Rich