It's a domain fad that (as far as I can tell) started with Writely becoming popular five years ago. Here's a rundown of recent domain fads as I recall them:
2003: del.icio.us con.fuses.us
2004: 37signals helps create 43 Things and Jay-Z has "99 Problems" -- coincidence? I think not.
2005: Flickr makes a splash and gets acquired, penultimate vowels no longr requird
2006: Writely, the superbly adverbly named webapp, goes Googly
2007: Xobni presses rewind (okay, this one never took off)
2008: Adverbs come on stronger with .ly
2009: URL shorteners go.to 6 characters or less
I can't actually think of a domain name fad that hit last year. Any suggestions?
It's some dumb marketing gimmick. The idea basically seems to boil down to "only old foggies use the major gTLDs these days, lets be hip and make our company name an adjective that is also our URL".
It's more than a gimmick. A recognizable and memorable URL has proven to be extremely beneficial to new startups. Memorable .com addresses are becoming endangered, or very very expensive.
To this day I have to doublecheck myself on where the '.'s are places in "del.icio.us" (in fact, it abandoning this URL some time ago). Now, "amazon.com"? Absolutely no worries there.
