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Hidden service addresses are not just regular domain names resolved via DNS, they're actually a hash of the hidden service's private (edit: public, see below) key. The fancy onion addresses out there (like Facebook's) were generated by doing a whole lot of brute-forcing to find a key that looks cool.

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Aren't the adresses hashes of the _public_ key? Hashes of the private key doesn't make much sense to me, as clients never come to know them.

Edit: Grammar

Yep, that's right, thanks. The public key is, of course, calculated based on the private key (these are RSA keys), hence why the brute-forcing still involves the private key, but it's not a hash of that key.

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