Earlier this year GoDaddy won the rights to distribute domains under the extension .me, which belongs to the country of Montenegro. After a number of private distribution periods for corporations, the highly desirable extension finally went on sale this morning for $20 dollars a year (with a minimum 2 year purchase - nice). And now, things are rapidly descending into chaos.
Many users have reported getting confirmations (and credit card charges) for their domains, only to receive the following cancellation notice about an hour later:
Dear Jason Kincaid,
The following domain name has failed to be registered:
WATCH.ME
Error: WATCH.ME: cannot register - already registered
We will evaluate this error and retry the registration
if appropriate.
If we are unable to successfully register the domain
name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please
allow one business day for the refund to be processed.
Understandably, a lot of people are outraged. And, disappointment and shattered dreams aside, there’s the issue of who actually will wind up owning each domain. A Twitter search for “hug.me” shows that at least a half dozen people hold confirmation letters (myself included).
GoDaddy says that the problems are a result of a “SuperBowl -like response to the open registration” that exceeded everyone’s expectations and wound up crushing their servers. Apparently they didn’t realize that after months of pent up demand and publicity for an extremely desirable domain, they’d be seeing an onslaught of prospective buyers.
The company says that disgruntled users can expect a refund in the next 24-48 hours, and that the servers should be stable now. No word on when we’ll know if we actually own our newly-purchased domains.
You can try your luck elsewhere on this list of alternative domain registrars for the .me extension.
We really wanted nr.me, but this one and a large number of other ’sexy’ names are being kept back for an auction later this year/next year. I’m not sure that this is GoDaddy’s fault - just part of the deal they had to make with Montenegro to get the .me licence.
In the end we’re using nrme.com and super happy with it.
I’m really pissed off against all the wanna-be-rich individuals and corporations who register domains for the sake of making profit.
This whole system sucks. Big time. There should be some rule forcing the domain owner to actually use it for a genuine purpose, meaning an actual business or service.
The government should enforce that. For example, past six months, if the domain name is not used (we’ve all seen these generic homepages…) for an actual business - with a verifiable physical address and phone number - then, the domain owner should be forced to sell it at cost price. Could be very easy to implement, with the burden of proof on the buyer’s shoulders.
Seriously, the internet is totally fvcked up now, domain names attribution should ben managed exclusively by non-profit organizations. After all, did your parents pay to name you? Do you pay to give your company a name or dba ? The answer is no.
So what happened that all this turned into a (very) profitable industry? (remember the guy how sold pizza.com for 2.5 millions dollars and purchased if for 10 dollars?). I don’t know, but result is that 95% of all good domains are retained by business holding them strictly for profit. Not to mention all the brokers involved in this stupid process.
This is totally unacceptable, especially for those who didn’t want or had the opportunity to launch their online business 10 years ago.
Is their really nothing the congress could do about it?
Me,
I hate to plug my own blog but this thread motivated me to write my own post on the subject of how to deal with domain parkers
http://www.marketing-ninja.com.....low-lifes/
domain parkers are low-lives and come just second after spammers.
I have to agree. There’s something indeed quite easy that could be done: putting the burden of proof onto the second buyer’s shoulders is a great idea.
If you are a domain parker, and obviously blocking a genuine business to use it, then what if that business could simply prove that you don’t operate any business related to the domain name?
It’d be simply to implement through a federal law. Say I’m interested in your domain and I know you don’t use it for real (just a generic homepage).
Then with a lawyer, I prove that you don’t own any business or service related to this domain name, that you have no physical address or phone number on your website etc…
Could be really not that complicated. Ok, will cost you 300 bucks to pay a lawyer, but you’d win your case 100% of times and own the domain for a reasonable price. Could be as simple as using a lawyer for traffic tickets.
Such a bill would kill the domain-parking business for ever, and for good.
U.S. Congress making a law over a country-code extension they don’t control, much more if one can’t show how it can cause harm? Please, they’ve got better things to do using taxpayer money than that.
i guess techmeme is auctioning
Registered freeforme.me instead of freefor.me, maybe someone will take it off my paws.
Sadly I created petsforme.me instead of petsfor.me, maybe someone will take it off my paws.
Worked for .me
http://friendfeed.com/e/490ee6.....it-was-me/
You’re probably going to have a hard time holding on to those, even if your orders go through. They’re all copyrighted…
Jason,
It’s not copyright. You might be talking about trademark issue. Which you are right
how about the .it (italy)? same problem with register screw.it or fvck.it etc.. ? any info on that?
haha… just noticed that screw.it is owned by adultfriendfinder. Good one!
Seconding what Jason said. You know that they can seize copyrighted domains at the same price you paid for them if you infringe on their trademark, right?
Who would want those besides their parent companies and spammers? Sounds like a lot of wasted money.
I was going to register godaddyscrewed.me. Actually, I’m pissed, I “had” aweso.me
I thought it would be aweso.me to get a cool domain for a change.
I had aweso.me as well. Damn.
HEY,
Yo Domain whores! http://www.backdoor.me is wide open to register! also, ICANN now allowed u to create any name extensions!
Didn’t work for me. I thought I had dik.me (my initials) but nooooo.
My situation is even MORE frustrating…
I entered into two domain opps during the “landrush” phase of the domain rollout, and paid $100 each (up front) for 2 years of domain registration. That’s fine, but why charge me with this fee, before even knowing if I have won the auction that is now active for the two domains I chose?
The lack of feedback from my queries has been frustrating to say the least, and now I have to wait until mid-august for the auction to be over. This all started mid-May! Meantime, godaddy has $200 of my cash, and I don’t even own the domains.
This is a cluster-f***.
The FAQs clearly told you what happens if multiple people reserve the same domain during land rush.
I tried to reg email.me and my card was charged, received the confirmation email and then received the exact same denial email. Total B.S. Now I have to wait 24-48 hours for my credit. I should never have been charged in the first place.
I got Digg.me and optimise.me, of course 10 minutes later they emailed to say I hadn’t.
Damn blow.me is already taken!!
It’s not taken, it’s being held back and might be availible at a later time: http://www.domain.me/index.php?page=6
What a nightmare. We too went for Hug.Me….
I tried to grab inside.me earlier, and after suffering through crazy long waits on the checkout pages thought I had secured it.
Turns out it was already taken.
Not only that, but I paid via Paypal drawn straight out of the bank so I’m legitimately out the cash until I get a refund! What jerks.
The same thing happened to me when i bought ping.me . I got a success email from godaddy and after some 20 min got a mail telling me sorry. Wondering what is happening and who will end up with ping.me domain.
godaddy.conned.me
I just wanted Wills.me. My last name… I sure hope they let me get it!
halvfet: hahaha. likewise!
Happens all the time with new releases…it’s the time stamp that should matter I think but who knows what system these guys are using.
Maybe you should get your attorney on it and first convince him it’s all vanity but you would still like to fight for it…lol…
I doubt anyone registering now will get any 3-letter names, all the combos are probably gone. Maybe some fours. Most good generic names should probably be already snatched up. The domain name industry is pretty well developed now and enough people with enough connections and enough tricks know how to lock up the best ones first, even it it means setting up their own registrars, like what happened with the .EU names and others. But for people who just want to go for a longer name or a non-dictionary name, there should be some good ones. All my pre-registrations went to auction and the ones I went for today got kicked back. F-ers!
GoDaddy has thousands of dollars of my money tied up. Some waiting on auctions, and some from failed domain purchases today. And my inbox is a horrendous mess of duplicated rejections from them.
I did manage to get FAILED.ME. So I redirected it to this flickr pic showing my disastrous inbox. http://www.flickr.com/photos/s.....1/sizes/o/
But their domain forwarding didn’t even catch. That unrelated failure is just another reason why I am seething over my experience with GoDaddy lately.
It takes a bit for the DNS update, it works now.
Holy shit did you rush for some domains!
It looks like 3K domains are under auction for up to the next 33 days where minimum cost is $75.
End users will take some convincing to believe that a dot me domain is legitimate.
it’s bad
.ME domains are in auction stage right now. Bid here https://auctions.domain.me/default.aspx to buy one. I registered a domain via domain.me, they charged my $98 but clearly mentioned the entire process. The auction will continue till end of next week and then the domains will be available to the public.
-ANurag
Well, Now I’m up to all 7 of my choices being rejected. Even though Godaddy was more than happy to charge my PayPal account and send me a confirmation for each one. I like the other individual above, I had PayPal draw the money out of my back account, so now I have to wait on Godaddy to refund my purchase, and then for PayPal to put it back into my account. Total B.S.
I registered a nice set of .me domains and 90% of them failed later on after I had bought them from GoDaddy! It was sooo disappointing to think you had a really good domain name, register it and feel secure, and then to discover its gone!
Same thing happened for me. I went for a fair few and am now left with loads of emails and no guarantee over which domain names I actually have. I actually went back and bought one again to see what happens. Sure the ONE thing a company selling domain names needs to do is to be able to know who owns what and take it out the system as soon as it’s bought. Fingers crossed I may have one that I want.
wonder who got “f**k.me”
f**k.me is a premium name.. most of the stuff are premium.. bs..
I cannot even start to tell the number of issues we’ve faced with GoDaddy, leaving us without options in a number of situations (email, forwarding, domain name management, etc.)
They used to be very different a few years ago, but I guess they’ve collapsed under the pressure of volume and their earlier reputation.
LMFAO….you guys are too much….
Anything to make a quick buck these days
I was about to register few this morning but I thought something like that might happen. I’ll just try my luck tonight after work and see what’s left.
Sometimes leftovers can be tasty, too
still not working, just paid for one, and then got the email saying I don’t have it.
I have to admit, I am really, really enjoying listening to the domain parking crowd squeal like stuck pigs over this one. Those guys make it a pain in the ass for startups to get decent branded domains without having to come up with goofy names. If GoDaddy decided to run a train on anyone, I’m glad it was those low-lifes.
I just got two domain names .ME but in Spanish. Hope not to received an email soon…
oh well. its all thesa.me
@Aaron Stannard - Oh please. A MASSIVE portion of those who wanted these domains weren’t typical “domain parkers” but average people who were excited to get these kind of domains. Every day people such as yourself man.
I thought I had 10 3 letter domains, then I got 10 rejection emails
@Kate
Guess you read a lot into my comment which wasn’t there. No doubt in my mind that there plenty of average people; there’s also a sleuth of domain parkers buying up 50, 100 domains a piece. Read the comments if you want some more examples - I’m just glad that people from that useless industry got a blackeye for once.
By the way, what were the average people planning on doing with their cool domains? Creating memorable domain names to associate with relevant helpful content, or just opportunist intellectual property hoarding? Go ahead - try and tell me it’s the former and not the latter. See if anyone believes you.
i got arin.me thru namecheap. hopefully they arent experiencing the same follies as godaddy (which i HATE FWIW). namecheap costs a bit more but the simpler admin UI is worth it IMO
I don’t like the new comments style by TC.. the number ones are good..
I agree Kevin, nice to see a list with numbers so we can direct our comments and make references easily
It is more difficult to follow the thread. Time stamps would be nice.
How about a poll?
Thanks for the feedback on the comments. We’re still working on improving them so let us know your thoughts. As for the numbers, they get confusing once you introduce threaded comments. That’s not to say we won’t add them back in, but we’ll have to decide whether it makes the most sense to do so.
Heard of decimals?
I just had it happen to me so it’s not fixed. I just bought (I thought) a handful of domains and already have emails that at three of them cannot be registered. “Error: .ME: cannot register - already registered We will evaluate this error and retry the registration
if appropriate.”
Quite frustrating…
Just to confirm, its still fucked up. I just “bought” wellfuck.me a couple of minutes ago and i got the same error mail.
Its screwed up, I registered about 8 domains…then I got 7 rejection letters. Then I registered 6 domains and got 6 rejected. Overall I got confirmations for about 50 domains, and out of those only 4 went through.
Now onto the fucked up part:
a) They currently have like a grand tied up.
b) I got my credit card put on hold because of this, so I had to call and get it cleared
c) Some of the domains I registered, and got rejection letters for, I can search for and see them be available. i.e. one of them happened like this: I registered domain, got a “we’ll let you know if we can get it”, then it showed up in control panel, and then it again disappeared.
Yeah, new comments suck.
what - a single running stream of comments is better? you’d never get this reply otherwise.
Registering .me addys via GoDaddy = Epic FAIL — same issue as @shoemoney & rest. Terrible. Plus they only offering credit, not a refund?
Looking over the news groups, it seems that enom has been holding up pretty good and are taking registrations without problems.
This all doesn’t surprise me after my previous encounter with GoDaddy. I signed up for their service that is supposed to notify me when the auction on my domain name would take place and put down a proxy bid for me when my domain name came available. I spent an hour on the phone with a rep confirming the process, what the bid would be, how they would notify me, etc. I found out a week after the auction that they hadn’t notified me and hadn’t placed the initial bid. I had to talk to their Office of the President and they said that the rep had intentionally misled me, the service wasn’t able to do any of the things listed on their website. It’s frustrating that I waited over two years for the domain to become available and trusted that they’d help me purchase it.
Aaron Stannard is misguided. It is called capitalism. Thanks for wishing us ill.
@Aaron,
I would reg a great name and try to sell it. What is the big deal about it. There are many more “worse” business out there. Take a look at stock market, loans, real estate…….
@Chris Kovac
Thank you!!!
@Chris Kovac,
Yes it capitalism but it’s a useless industry - what value does your ownership of a domain offer? Oh wait, NOTHING. All you domain parkers do is create inconvenience for people who might actually want to us those domains to create a valuable service for other people. Essentially your industry revolves around people paying you to stop being a pain in the ass.
The entire concept of capitalism is to exchange valuable goods and services for money; what goods and services do you offer, other than buying up intellectual property from domain registrars at virtually no cost and holding it indefinitely? You don’t offer value, you’re a pest.
I’m not misguided, I just don’t like pests like you getting in the way of people who actually try to add value. QED.
Maybe they don’t offer value to you and some people. But if they offer value to other people, then that’s all there is to it.
And it’s fine you don’t like them, and they don’t like you. You’re both equal.
Believe I’ve scored…
Looky.me
Dreamy.me
(1) Godaddy sends receipt email (which doesn’t mean anything)
–> if (failed) - look for for email w/ subject heading
“REGISTRAR: MCDONALDS.ME ”
–> if (success) -> look for email w/ subject heading
“Information regarding the registration of LOOKY.ME”
Pick’ns are getting slim as the clock ticks
add
Monopoly.me
I am just wondering if domain names are becoming obsolete anyway. I rarely type URL in my browser, most site I get them via a search engine, and sites I usually go are stored in my browser once for all (bookmarks, tabs, magic FF3 URL bar, etc.). So if I type a word in my browser URL bar, it tries to find the site (by domain name, but also by page title, by my own tags, etc.).
I wont be surprised that the next big website will have no domain name at all (yes, just a IP address). And to get there you will have to type in your browser the name of site (title of the site, not the domain name) and your browser will look at its history or search engine to find the IP address.
So basically, the browser + search engines are the new DNS/ICANN. And let’s this giant scam/hold-up/tax on domain names (operated by ICANN+registrars) ends… First it looked like a giant scam, now it turns to be pathetic.
I got the one I wanted in the land grab phase
status.me
Darn, Darren. You got it before me!
I could find it easier to complain, but…congratulations instead.
Yeah this morning was crazy and frustrating for me 2 at check out. Godaddy was stalling in between pages but i ended up registering 3 good ones thought out the morning and used PROMO CODE CHH2 which gave me a total of $5 off each .Me, No Cancellation letter yet…..
I’m pretty sure I got beam.me this morning around 11:30am but it is still notlisted under the “My Domains” section. How long did it take to show up for everyone else?
You can’t make this stuff up:
Afilias got the deal of the century registering this and tens of thousands of premium .me names back in April.
The best part is they got a trademark on all the names in the year 1900, 100 years before their incorporation.
Domain registration for mobile.me
registered Afilias: 4/29/08
trademarked applied: 1/1/1900
trademarked registered: 1/1/1900
See how Afilias.com owns you
Have you even bothered to look at the whois on domain.me? MOBILE.ME, as well as WATCH.ME, the subject of this thread, are both RESERVED by the registry as premium names.
They have been reserved and on the list for months (you can see the list http://www.domen.me/cms/site_f....._Names.pdf). You never had a chance at registering them, as they are planned to be released as premium auctions months from now.
As for other false registrations, this happens every openregistration with every registrar… everyone tries for the same names at the same time.
As for LLL, there are still plenty available. I got some today. And check out ### too.
I understand your frustration, but do some research before you post please.
@Aaron,
“Yes it capitalism but it’s a useless industry - what value does your ownership of a domain offer? ”
You should educate yourself a bit more about Domain Parking, Selling, Developing.
I’m not saying that everybody is doing a “good” job by registering certain domains but there are a lot of people who are making a lot, a lot of money by Parking, Selling or Developing Domain Names.