It’s not exactly Googorola-sized news, but I just noticed that Google has very recently gained ownership over the domain Android.me (not worth linking as it is currently not in use – yet?).
Now, Google may have simply asked – or forced – the former owner to transfer ownership of the catchy domain name, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to launch a product by that name (besides, they already own android.com so why bother?).
For that and other reasons, I think it’s unlikely Google is planning to make Android.me the home for a new service, although I’ve been known to be wrong before. Either way, somewhat interesting.
After all, .me domain names are starting to get in vogue lately. Google worked on the Ro.me project, for instance, and there are plenty of other examples such as About.me, which was acquired by our parent company AOL, but also Ask.me, Connect.me, txt.me, Blog.me, Blip.me, With.me and News.me, a joint project from bit.ly and The New York Times).
Then there are startups like Tango, Kiip and Formspring, which also went with .me domain names.
The list goes on: Facebook owns fb.me, WordPress owns wp.me, Yahoo owns me.me, Microsoft owns windows.me, AOL owns aol.me, VKontakte owns vk.me, and Time Magazine owns ti.me.
Google should probably have a chat with WhitePages.com, by the way, as they own goog.me.
According to a recent blog post by the .ME Registry, more than 530,000 .me domain names – in 200 countries – have been secured in the three years they’ve been publicly available for registration.
Google was smart enough to register a couple of .me domain names from the get-go, including google.me, gmail.me, adwords.me, adsense.me, plus.me, blogger.me, orkut.me and youtube.me.
For whatever reason, they missed out on android.me and chro.me – but now they’ve solved half of that particular problem.