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Today’s .me domain registration was very interesting. The process was definitely a bit FUBARed by the registrars as they allowed people to register domains that were already taken, but the fact that they did lead to a rather interesting side effect: creativity.

I watched with interest as people I knew tried out interesting combinations of domains, found cool ones then tried to think of uses for them, etc. It was very different than the normal .com domain hunt.

I don’t know if .me will take off - it’s certainly an interesting TLD, but the .com seems stronger than ever. Even the iPhone, the very model of a modern device, only has a “.com” button¹. Is .me any better than .info (except maybe for personal domains)?

I picked up a couple of .me domains that I thought could be useful down the road if .me becomes widely adopted. I’m not sure if I’ll actually use them - I’m tending more towards “.com at all costs” these days - which is pretty sad.

Time will tell if a good .me is worth more than a mediocre .com.

1. Which is, quite frankly, shameful. [back]

Popularity: 2% [?]

This is great (thanks Joe).

I see people complaining and whining about Twitter’s downtime and issues¹ all the time. I understand where they are coming from, but believe it or not I actually like the fact that Twitter isn’t a 100% reliable service.

I don’t want Twitter to become a responsibility; I like having a casual relationship with it. I read tweets when I want to, and ignore things I’ve missed most of the time. I’ve already got people asking me if I get their replies or direct messages on Twitter - I know it will only get worse if reliability improves.

Twitter is a fun service for me - a distraction, an amusement. It’s something I like to turn to when I have time. I don’t want it to become something I’m beholden to (like e-mail).

I know that other people have very different views on this, but I actually like the fact Twitter is a bit of an adventure .

1. I’ve had my own experience struggling to scale what some people consider a simple service, so I guess I’m also pre-disposed to be sympathetic to people trying to bring services to the web. [back]

Popularity: 10% [?]

PhoneFactor is a WordPress plugin that provides an additional layer of security when logging in to your WordPress site.

It’s a pretty cool system. When you log in to your WordPress blog with PhoneFactor enabled, you receive a phone call asking you to press # to authorize. When you do so, you are logged in. If you do not, then the login attempt fails.

Basically, this means someone needs to get your username, password and phone in order to log in to your WordPress site as you.

Crowd Favorite worked with the PhoneFactor team to build this integration on their API layer. This was a fun project for us - it’s always nice to enhance WordPress by integrating features from another service.

Besides building the integration with the API to authenticate via phone, we also built the PhoneFactor registration step right into the WordPress admin so that the user wouldn’t have to leave the WordPress admin when activating the plugin and getting it set up. I think it’s a much better user experience.

We integrated some instructional banners into the WordPress admin pages to let people know the next steps to getting things set up after activating the plugin. We also built in some more advanced user features like whitelisting IP addresses so that you don’t have to use PhoneFactor authentication if you’re logging in from your home machine.

The download and more information are available at the WordPress Plugin repository on wordpress.org.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 17% [?]