For as long as I can remember I’ve tried to secure a domain for my surname, the obvious candidates were either a .com or .co.uk but both of these are taken by huge companies. The .com company leaves a particularly bad taste in my mouth, as they are only forwarding the domain to an internal page of another website, with no mention of the URL on the page. I’ve tried several different methods of contact to see if they would be interested in selling; phone, email and blogging but as you would expect, I have not received a response.
Unfortunately it seems like I won’t be able to secure either of these domains, so I’ve been looking at the options available to me. For a good while I was very interesting in acquiring a Niger domain, which would look like osbor.ne, but I decided after much deliberation, that no matter how much I wanted it, a £300 outlay every two years was just too expensive.
In the last few months there have been more people mentioning the latest domain extension to be brought to the masses, the Colombian TLD, .co. At first I thought it was just going to be another pointless domain, something that wasn’t going to catch on, much like the .me domains that came out two years ago. I pondered over this decision for a few weeks to help me decided what I wanted to do; forget about purchasing it or try my luck with a pre-order. In the end I decided to go ahead with the pre order and I now own osborne.co.
To be honest, I’m not really sure if a .co domain will ever have the same weighting as a .co.uk or a .com, or even if it will catch on, but it will definitely be interesting to see what companies lean towards it. There were two reasons which lead to me pre-ordering the domain:
- People make spelling errors all of the time and a .co domain is only one letter shorter than a .com. Obviously this doesn’t mean anything but perhaps something like this could help a site climb the ranking quicker?
- As I said above, I wanted a domain for my surname for a good few years now and I wasn’t prepared to let a suitable alternative pass me by. If a year passes and I haven’t used it as much as I thought then I’ll simple let it expire.
What do you think, is this new domain extension a waste of time or indeed something that could prove to be quite valuable?