.ME domain land rush

I got back from lunch today and noticed an RSS post from Mashable regarding some chaos with .me TLD domain registration at godaddy.com. “.me land rush” I thought for a second, before diving into godaddy and searching out all the domains I always wanted. Montenegro must be very happy with the demand.

20 minutes later and I was very disappointed by missing out on nudge.me (I had it in my cart, and by the time I got to checkout some lucky sod had it wrapped up).

Of course by the time myself and one or two others here at work arrived at the party there was thin pickings.

Eric picked up a prize with boring.me which he’s planning on apply subdomains to.

Greg picked up a handful of personal and name based domains, as well as failure.me. He also just received an email from godaddy saying one of the domains he got is being disputed as it might have been sold to more than one person, an issue godaddy was having with aweso.me in the mashable post)

I walked away with nothing more than sykes.me (which I’ll be subdomaining to jon.sykes.me (which will be the new domain for this site probably). And introducing.me which I have no idea what I’ll do with, but I do know i have some pet projects lined up that could use this.

I was most disappointed to find so many gems already gone…

nudge.me
remind.me
remember.me
youowe.me

Even as I walked away from the chaos there were still crazy ones left, but at $40 for 2 years, and a personal excess of domains I had to be picky. Personal favorites were.

everyonehates.me (which I would have made into an emo forum). [update: it's now gone as well]

I really need to try and plan ahead for these events.

Update, it seems the .me whois servers have now gone down. Which is a shame as I was going to do some tests to see what had sold today. I added it to http://whoisme.isbackonline.com so I can be notified when it goes back up.

Further update: It seems I and the rest of the internet had the wrong whois servers for the me domain. I was using whois.nic.me which is referenced in a ton of places. But it turns out that’s not the right address, you actually need WHOIS.meregistry.net port 43, which is referenced on a rather obvious site… domain.me.

Now that I have this new found information I was able to run my test to see which .me domains had offcially taken from my 2,500 word verb list. It what I’m sure is tant amount to spam I ran a whois check on the lot and recorded all the successful hits. This gave me two lists of taken and possibly available .me domains.