This is beautiful, but it's such a shame that US law enforcement have been stealing .com domains from people for things that their users have done. We've had a bunch of Hacker News threads and I don't want to resurrect old beasts of that sort, but some option for non dot-com names would be wonderful. (Especially because .com reminds me of 1999-2001 at this point and it seems like we designers should perhaps be treating it as a ten-year-old fashion.)
I couldn't disagree more with that we should be treating .com as passe. While .me or whatever is "cool", the majority of the world still relates to .com's the most. I'm in Taiwan right now and the people here probably have no idea what a .me or a .it is. They are using .com.tw, not .me.tw (and yes, of course I understand that .me is from Montenegro and this would never be possible). And the "reminds me of 1999-2001" just sounds silly...it goes without saying that there have been thousands of successful .com's since 2001, like the one you are looking at right now.
Actually .me.tw would be possible, just as there are .gov.tw etc. so .com in the .com.tw is not a top-level domain (.tw is), it is a 2nd level domain in this case. so there could be xyz.tw just like .co was originally exclusive to government of colombia and you could only get 2nd level domains, ex domain.com.co etc.
I agree. A quick glance at the top 5,000 domains in terms of traffic more than demonstrates the sheer dominance of the .com brand for domains. It's beyond overwhelming.
There are very few relevant .me or .io (etc) domains. That will continue to be the case for years to come.
It's not Twitter.me or TwitPic.me or yfrog.me, it's not Tumblr.me, it's not Pinterest.me, it's not Groupon.me, it's not homeaway.me, it's not yelp.me. All the major success stories online will continue to be branded primarily through .com - and those that start out as .me or .io will move to .com as they can afford to purchase the prime domain.
