What about .me? Who?
July 17, 2008 – 3:49 pm | by Keith
I’m sure anyone who is online and works with websites has now heard about the new domain extension .me. I am also fairly confident that many have been reading the horror stories or experienced the problems first hand. With that said…What the hell were they thinking?
I can understand the amount of traffic and people interested in registering these domains, but there has to be a better way of doing it. I sat patiently on the GoDaddy website for about an hour watching the countdown clock tick away. The website was fine, loading normally and I foolishly began to think maybe GoDaddy is ready and can handle the influx of traffic and registrations. Once 10am (my time) rolled around the trouble began for myself and everyone involved. I fired off the first few domains I was interested in and ‘luckily’ they were still available. I selected them, continued through the next page and then I waited…and waited…and waited. As I proceeded to the payment screen it hung and I knew I had lost my domains.
So I refreshed the page, at this point not really caring if I got the domains or not, as I figured they have already been registered. To my surprise after a couple more refreshes the domains were still in my cart, not taken and the payment page loaded. I quickly clicked through with my PayPal account that was already on file hoping to avoid any more pages and it went through without a hitch. I then received my GoDaddy confirmation email listing the domains I had registered, followed by a PayPal receipt.
At this point I thought life was good, so I headed to a few domaining forums to check out the current .me buzz. Everyone was pleased with their registrations and began listing their new domains. I listed what I had registered (youand.me, chase.me, talkto.me and view.me) and waited for the domains to show up in my account. Then people began complaining about the WHOIS database not updating and getting bounce back emails about the domains being taken. I figured had got mine because my payment confirmation and I hadn’t received any emails back from GoDaddy. Then it happened, nearly an hour after the fact i received emails for all four domains saying they were already registered.
“Dear Keith,
The following domain name has failed to be registered: VIEW.ME Error: VIEW.ME: cannot register - already registered We will evaluate this error and retry the registration if appropriate. If we are unable to successfully register the domain name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please allow one business day for the refund to be processed."
To be honest I wasn’t too upset. I didn’t go for the extremely relevant one word domains because the chances would be slim. I went for good/clever domains that probably had a little less competition for acquiring. Once I ‘purchased’ I these domains I had almost instant buyers remorse. Are you going to be able to resell something like youand.me a year or two from now for big profit? I really don’t think so. Like the .name extension the buzz fizzled out quickly and you were left with another ‘non big three’ domain.
I have yet to receive a refund from GoDaddy, but I have contacted them and waiting patiently. My main problem with he process is the system of checking if it is available. I realize that is quite the load of registrations, but there has to be a more instant way of securing a domain. Once it’s been searched it should be checked and it’s either available or it isn’t and then held for X amount of time until it is registered or released. Letting people get as far as payment and confirmation emails only to find out they were too late is extremely disappointing and a tie up of money.
Have a good one,
Keith
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