Carson Systems, makers of web applications, are true believers using blogging as a conversation, and in the power of openness in attracting customer and community interest. How do we know? Because they’re documenting their application development process as it happens on Bare Naked App. The app they’re creating is called Amigo, and in the blog they’ve been candid about left turns, mistakes, and successes in such tasks as developing and selecting the domain name:

We chose a URL, it’s www.heyamigo.net

It wasn’t difficult to come up with this. We knew that it was HeyAmigo as soon as we thought of it. Predictably though the .com was already taken by these guys. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Now obviously the .com would have been better but it’s not available so we were faced with a choice. Do we settle for a URL that is clearly substandard, like amigoonline.com, or gotamigo.com (apologies to those who have any URL with “got” infront of it). Or we could stick with our first choice, fly in the face of fashion and hope that no-one notices, or cares that it’s not a .com.

Selfishly, we sought to gratify our own pleasures and went with the .net.

We’ve had a mixed response. The average comment is (sucking air through teeth noise) “aaaah .net?” or “I’m not sure about the .net, couldn’t you get the .com?”.

So there we have it. This one error could be the ruination of all our plans to take over the world one web app at a time. Or people may not give a shit. Our money is on the latter.

I’m sure they’re shielding the world from some aspects of the project — and not just from what the application will do (although one can read clues into things like the name, logo, visual design, etc). Even so, they’re quite open about their decisions on costs, and it’s a terrific read. Well worth adding to your feedreader.