In today’s branded world, it is almost impossible to imagine a company that does not own the domain associated with their name or brand. But several of today’s famous domains had a very different use before they were big.
For example, did you know that iCloud.com once was the personal homepage of a Japanese professor?
Minimalistic design – Amazon.it
There is almost one Amazon for every top-level domain today. Amazon.it may not be the most famous of them, but still, it’s Amazon. And before Amazon, there were Molteco.
Is it a brand, is it a country or is it a town? Who knows? What we do know is that Molteco clearly used the approach “less is more” when designing it’s site.
When “Android” was sci-fi – Android.com
There was a time when the word “Android” referred to a robot with a human appearance and not an operating system. At that time, “Android Creativity” was the company behind Android.com.
Anyone that has heard of a smartphone or a tablet can probably guess what Android.com covers today.
Share via Dropbox Intranet mail – Dropbox.com
Sharing has never been easier, and DropBox is just one of the services you could use to share today. Or you could go back in time and share things via the Dropbox Internet/Intranet mail server.
If you are to register for the service today, don’t forget to check the “System Requirements”. You may have to install Windows 95 again.
Bright and shining – Goal.com
For all you soccer lovers under the age of 20; Goal.com did not always give us the latest news:
The content may not be that much to look at, but someone had surely learned a thing or two about hexadecimal notation for colors to get that bright and shining background.
I, cloud – iCloud.com
Clouds have, until recently, just been something you would mention when talking about the weather. So a domain like iCloud.com may not have been so hard to come by for professor Insung Jung.
As almost every other i-ish domain (except iPad.com), it leads straight to Apple these days.
A custom created space – Myspace.com
Myspace may not be the biggest social network anymore, but we guess it still has more visitors than this company:
When your business needs “an Internet Web Page”, you now know where not to turn.
Not Microsoft’s Outlook, but Andrew’s – Outlook.com
Going from Hotmail to Outlook? Or maybe to Andrew Seybold’s Outlook.com:
Unfortunately, we too missed the last WDU so we can’t tell you what it was all about.
Anything at all to do with photos? – Photoshop.com
Photoshop has been around for ages, but it has always been an Adobe product, so the photoshop.com domain has not always been its home.
It may not be the perfect design for a site that has anything to do with photos.
Probably not THE Walmart – Walmart.com
Even in the beginning, walmart.com was about shopping.
But is it really the same Walmart? The “Interesting Links” make us doubtful.
Famous domain for a not so famous cause – iPhone.com
iPhone is known for having revolutionized the mobile phones as we knew them. So what could be further from today’s iPhone.com than this?
We are not trying to spoil a perfectly good protest, but when you publish something on the Internet, it is likely that the ones who read it are “those who have the luxury of owning a computer”.
Other famous domains?
We found these ten examples interesting and funny, and we are sure that if we had kept on looking we had found many more. Do you have any favourites that we did not cover in this article?
Data and screenshots: Amazon.it, Android.com, Dropbox,com, goal.com, iCloud.com, iPhone.com, myspace.com, outlook.com, photoshop.com and walmart.com
Image (top) via Shutterstock.
