Found the service I mentioned in the OP about translating Bitcoin addresses into names. It's called OneName. Seems popular too.

Quote from: BCwinning on March 05, 2015, 11:05:05 AM

yea I'm using meowbit actually

There is also this site too although I haven't used it:

http://dotbit.me/

Click on the "surf.bit" tab and choose one of the letters to browse the sites.

Quote from: JohnnyBTCSeed on March 05, 2015, 02:52:35 PM

other points to consider.

namecoin has some competition, nxt dns system, and bts dns system

namecoin has only had 1 fork, huntercoin.

And what's to come:

Over the last two or three months, our very own lead developer was awarded a donation of F2pool(Discus Fish) to re-implement Namecoin onto the latest Bitcoin Core (see https://github.com/domob1812/namecore/ ), improving and updating Namecoin's very old code (from around Bitcoin version 0.3). This is now being used by F2pool/Discuss Fish and others.

He is now in the early process of doing the same for Huntercoin, so that we will be able to see those great benefits also. This will also enable to make use of pruning efforts being made upstream by the Bitcoin developers.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=435170.msg10625130#msg10625130

I've always had an interest in Huntercoin since it's a very unique coin and one of only two where the coin takes the form of a human-playable game (the other being Motocoin until it got taken over by bots).

Quote from: Stealthcoin on March 05, 2015, 05:44:57 PM

One of the biggest problems is that Namecoins Creator died, this damaged the coin real bad as their development is very slow.

The creator of Namecoin (Vincent Durham) was an anonymous pseudonym who is currently retired. It was the lead dev who died. The lead dev of Namecoin was also the creator of Huntercoin.

Quote from: CIYAM on March 05, 2015, 06:04:11 PM

Quote from: PolarPoint on March 05, 2015, 06:02:14 PM

Namecoin is a nice alt which actually is useful. It is a shame .bit domain never took off. We need a cool site with a .bit domain to get more people to install the namecoin dns plugin.

Again - with all the squatting it simply will never work.

Those that took all the .bit domain names just want to get rich so they don't care about the success of the tech at all (in their mind they invested 10 USD to try and get 1M USD and if that doesn't happen they are happy to just lose the 10 USD and see the whole thing fail).

You just need to *forget* about .bit as that will never happen.

The Namecoin FAQ's proposed solution to the problem of domain squatting doesn't seem satisfactory IMHO. Someone who owns the domains Facebook.bit or Namecoin.bit isn't going to let their domains expire if renewal fees are slightly raised, and if renewal fees rise too much, then that will discourage ordinary people from using .bit domains too.

Quote from: cakir on March 05, 2015, 06:08:47 PM

Do I have to run my namecoind or qt to make my domain active?

Let's say I register blabla.bit with core wallet and then close wallet. Will it be available when I close my wallet? Or I've to run my wallet to keep it active to resolve dns?

Entries are stored in the blockchain which is shared across all nodes in the network so names should resolve even when your client is not running or when your computer is shut down. However, you will need to run as a full node in order to register and renew domain names. If you don't want to run a full node, there are domain name registration services that can do this for you. More information about the process is here:

https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Register_and_Configure_.bit_Domains

Quote from: JohnnyBTCSeed on March 05, 2015, 06:34:58 PM

are the .bit parked names worse then regular dns?

Not sure what you mean by this. Most domains are registered but have no website. Some are just parked with a placeholder page. A minority are actual websites.

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can other domains be added or will it forever be only .bit?

Currently, it is only .bit domains that can be registered but it could be expanded in the future. Other than raising renewal fees, another possible method suggested by the community to combat squatting is to expand the range of TLDs that can be registered which should free up more space for new names.

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are there any linux distros that include namecoin? maybe ubuntu or mint?

I'm not sure if there are any distros that come with Namecoin or support for .bit domains preinstalled but almost all Linux distros are capable of running Firefox and there are plugins available for Firefox which can add support for .bit domains. From a quick Google search, it seems that Chrome has similar plugins too.