There are now more than 550,000 .ME domains registered, and hundreds of .ME domains are found on the Alexa Top 100,000 Sites list. With stats like that, it’s clear that even the most casual of web surfers will run into a .ME domain in their travels around the net.

How .ME Domains are Being Used

The .ME domain extension is a TLD with some obvious and compelling use cases. Here’s just a few examples in different verticals:

• .ME for vanity shorteners: WordPress.com has WP.ME for blog posts, Time Magazine is using TI.ME, and Facebook is using FB.ME (and there are many more examples).
• Personal profile services: .ME is an obvious choice for a site that provides a personal landing page. You might have seen About.ME, and Flavors.ME which both offer customized personal homepages at .ME domains. Users of either service can also purchase their own .ME domain for an even more personalized experience.
• New web services: There are more .ME domains available than in other extensions, so .ME is getting a lot of love with new web services. You might have seen formspring.ME, join.ME, connect.ME and jetpack.ME among others.
• Blogs and personal websites: .ME has always been a great choice for a personal site. More and more high profile bloggers and celebrities are choosing .ME domains. Omis.ME, Zee.ME, thecranberries.me and dannybrown.ME are some great examples.

The long and short of it is this: if you aren’t offering .ME domains to your customers, then you aren’t providing them with a great option that will help them find their perfect domain name. Without that perfect domain name, they won’t be looking for additional services like hosting, SSL and email.

On Sale Now!

More information and marketing help to get you started is available here. And remember that we have a great $7.99 promotion on .ME domains that runs through the end of the year.

Here’s the details:

• .IN: the $1.99 promotion will continue, but effective April 1st, 2010, the promo price increases slightly to $2.99. The promo will be extended through June 30th, 2010.
• .ME: The promo will be extended through June 30th, 2010 under the same terms.

Already signed up? You’re all set

For Resellers who are already taking advantage of the promotions, there’s nothing you need to do. We’ll extend it for you automatically. Resellers not signed up can visit our domains promotions page and sign up for the individual promotions that are currently underway.

No so for Go Daddy, they caught some heat on the tech-blog TechCrunch which broke the story that “many users [had] reported getting confirmations (and credit card charges) for their domains, only to receive the following cancellation notice about an hour later.”

And the social networking news blog Mashable picked up the story saying, “it appears GoDaddy is buckling under the pressure and is about to have an ugly mess on its hands.”

GoDaddy later responded to the Mashable blog post saying that the problems were as a result of “system issues in our communication with the registry.” GoDaddy will, of course, refund customers who had failed registrations.

Even today, a Twitter search reveals many unhappy GoDaddy customers who thought they had registered sweet .ME domains and have since been told otherwise.

As you would expect, OpenSRS is ready to go at launch. If you are a Tucows Domains Reseller, you’re all set to start selling.

According to the .ME Registry, including both sunrise and landrush, a total of more than 30,000 domains have already been registered. Auctions for names with more than one competing buyer are taking place now.

The Registry also set aside a list of premium names that will be auctioned off later in the year. The list includes names like love.me and buy.me among others. Lists of both the premium names that will be auctioned, and reserved names that won’t be allowed to be registered, are available at the Registry website.