I assume there's a chance that a competitor could buy these and take some traffic from mispellings, etc.
But if you don't know how successful your app is going to be, this can be a lot of upfront expense.
If 16 bucks decides the go/no go on something like that you are probably looking at a hobby project, not a business.
One way around this problem is to have a bunch of generic domains that you do your first trials on, if you find that something 'has legs' you can always decide at that point to come up with a good name and get a complete set of domains.
It also will help to stop phishers that will use the .net or .org version of your domain in a spam campaign to tell people that their password may have been compromised and other jokes like that.
If you're still working on it after 6 months, get the .net/.org/etc Consider it a present to yourself for crossing that milestone.
I personally don't buy misspellings, but I will get ones that have a phonetic similarity (for instance, we have both doleaf.com and dewleaf.com)
These days I would seriously buy the big three for so much as a good turn of phrase in a blog post. (If you're going to coin the next "Long Tail", own the domain and you'll own the idea by default.) Registering the big three for two years costs far less than writing a blog post does.
I don't typically worry about typos or adjacent domains unless they're extraordinarily likely to cause confusion (chinesenewyearbingocards.com vs chinesenewyearsbingocards.com -- I bought that after I was incapable of even writing my Apache config without mixing the two of them).
The competitor with every plural variation of my domains can enjoy the extra 10 visits a year he gets from them. I have better things to do with my time.
Kind of ironic, given the site was for finding good domain names...
I dont buy misspellings usually....
What I do do though is if I think of an idea and find a good domain for it I grab the domain; I think I have around 50-80 domain names (not unique; that includes the TLD variants) sat waiting for my projects to go on them.
It was probably the tweet that got me into trouble. I'm kicking myself for not realizing that would happen before hand.
I should have registered everything (including the domains) as quickly as I could (in near immediate succession). Only after that should I have started tweeting or filling out any information beyond what was required to establish ownership over the accounts.
Now, I'm sure there's someone out there who hopes to either sell me the google account, or attempt to use the google account for financial fraud.
Much better than to have somebody see you, recognize potential and buy your other domains and then demand some $15M for it. Of course the odds of this happening are quite low, but nevertheless, in the event that you make it it's a small price to pay to avoid the future headache.
edit: Yah, it was TC that had the story... just visit http://wwwtwitter.com to check it out.
