Shortly after Montenegro gained independence in June of 2006, the ISO 3165 Maintenance Agency assigned the emerging nation the country code "ME." By submitting an application to the IANA to have .Me designated as the country's top-level domain (TLD), the Government of Montenegro took its most important step in establishing .Me. The designation was finally approved and took place in September 2007.

What Can You Do with .Me?

.Me is a true phenomenon among TLDs. With its unforgettable meaning and limitless word combinations, .Me gives a truly personal tone to your domain name. If you are looking for a name that speaks for itself, .Me is your best choice. Let .Me speak for your online business or personal blog.

.Me's potential is enormous, and it simply asks that you be creative and coin the name that best suits you. If you have a great original idea for a domain name, register .Me before it's taken. To check out other ideas, explore the world of .Me.

History of .Me

.Me opened to the world of domains on 17 July 2008. Because of its unique meaning, it is used as both a personalized Web address and a catchy business marketing tool around the world. It caught on initially in English, soon followed by localized and standards-compliant international domain names in, for example, Spanish, Italian, and Montenegrin.

By May 2009, less than one year later, more than 250,000 .Me domains were registered by people in 182 countries. This makes .Me a truly international domain.

.Me Is...

• Great for personalized domains, such as John.Me, Bob.Me, and Mary.Me, which could, for example, be used for a personal blog or website.
• Fantastic as a call-to-action domain, such as LookAt.Me, WillYouDate.Me, ChatWith.Me.
• Perfect for social networking, e.g. TheWorldof.Me.

.Me domains can currently be registered through one of 117 accredited .Me registrars. To find out more about becoming an accredited .Me registrar, go to www.Domain.Me.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considering sweeping changes to the way top-level domains (TLDs) are assigned. Under this newly proposed plan, any organization could apply for any top-level domain (ICANN calls these new domain names generic TLDs). Google, for example, could get a .google domain, or Coke products might be found under .coke. If accepted, this would be the most significant modification of the TLD naming system yet.

Update: ICANN just approved these changes.

The new rule proposes a $50.000 to $100.000 fee for the registration of one of these new domain names, effectively restricting their availability to larger organizations.

This new plan would have a number of ramifications, but maybe most importantly, the domain name speculation business is going to be changed forever. Most interesting and generic .com names have long been taken. The new system, however, will bring an abundance of new domains, which might drive down prices for .com domains. This is surely going to upset a lot of speculators, as Chris Morrison also points out on VentureBeat. Right now, speculators can hoard interesting domain names and auction them off for millions of dollars (business.com sold for around $350 million).

Will Consumers Care?

In the past, ICANN slowly added a number of new top-level domains such as .info, .mobi, .travel, .coop, or .asia. None of these gained a lot of mind-share among consumers and can often be bought at a discount because demand for them is so low. For the average Internet user, .com is the only domain on the Internet, with only .edu, .gov, .org, and .net having some traction as well. Not coincidentally, these (together with .mil) were also the first TLDs available on the net.

The question is if these generic TLDs will be more successful. If consumers didn't adapt to .info, will they adapt to .coke? The .com domain has become so ingrained in our Internet culture that it has practically become synonymous with domain names and the Internet as a whole.

While some web services like del.icio.us were able to attract a considerable amount of users with their idiosyncratic domains, even del.icio.us finally bought delicious.com when it started attracting more mainstream users.

It looks like these questions might get answered pretty soon. Judging from ICANN's timeline for the introduction of generic TLDs, we could start seeing them as early as Q2 of 2009.