WP.me
Although they do not allow registration of .me names shorter than three letters, with the help of GoDaddy, Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress managed to strike a deal with the registry and on 24 July 2009 he got his hands on WP.me. WordPress.me was registered by the same famous Ma.tt already back in 2008 during the land rush period (10 July 2008 to be precise), though the latter is still kept unproductive.
Earlier this year, Automattic, Matthew's company, also acquired WP.com from Yahoo!. There were many discussions of how to better use it - for the moment it just redirects to the main site.
The idea of WP.me is to provide short URLs, like http://wp.me/sf2B5-shorten, for WordPress users only to be used @twitter-like services.
According to Matthew (our test conclusions are in italic):
- WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
Not true. There is also co.me and ac.me dedicated to commercial and educational organisations in Montenegro.
- Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
True. It is better to say: "every blog can get a WP.me URL now". It can be done through a "Get Shortlink" button next to the "permalink" in the WordPress editor. Though, true, the links are generated for every entry, even for the old ones.
- These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
True. E.g., http://matt.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/a5-wagyu/ is also linked as http://wp.me/p4-51.
- It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
True.
- The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
True. The question for how long will WordPress be around? Probably for another decade at least. According to Alexa, this site is a high riser and just made it into their global top 20 list.
- WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.
Maybe. As Akismet doing good job, one can probably trust Automattic guys.
Now WordPress should team up with GoDaddy and allow its premium users to register sites like Berlin.its.me or MyName.Me so that they can run their fancy professional and personal blogs too.
