Collins, Michael G.

Thanks to our good friends in Montenegro I’ve managed to stake my newest claim on the world-wide web. Now that the dust has settled from this summer’s .me land-rush, registering for a .me domain is relatively painless as long as you don’t mind using GoDaddy.

Since I’m not any of these people, connecting my real-life and online identities has always been difficult. I’m reminded of a conversation I was having with another developer, who after attempting to search for me by name remarked, "John Doe should really change his name to Mike Collins."

I suppose I could have gone the other route, changing my real name to match my website à la Cutout but I’ve gotten used to Mike, and I never seem to be able to think of a really clever-sounding domain that either hasn’t already been taken or has stopped sounding clever by the time I actually go to register it.

The .me TLD is nice because it doesn’t seem to imply anything else, and it seems well-suited for a personal domain name. I’m not very organized, so I don’t want a .org, and I’m not a network so .net doesn’t make sense. I’m not a .biz and you won’t see me on .tv either.

.com has become so ubiquitous that it has lost its original meaning, but it’s also so saturated that to register anything that hasn’t already been taken you have to make up something that sounds like a Star Wars character. But .com has become synonymous with the Web in most people’s minds, and I doubt .me will do much to change that, which means we will probably be stuck with goofy start-up names well into Web 3- or 4.0.