Tuesday, June 03, 2008

dot ME

Mobile Me: What a New .Mac Might Mean for the iPhone

Apple has bought a slew of .me domains, the soon-to-be-launched domain suffix for Montenegro that's scheduled to go live on July 17th. Macworld UK spoke to Predrag Lesic, in charge of the Montenegro’s .me registry, and he thinks the domain will be an international hit:

We think .me can offer a new business around domain names with verbs,” Lesic says, such as drive.me or fly.me

You can imagine what the others might be.

Speculation around the web says Apple may be planning to rebrand its withering-on-the-vine web service, .Mac, as Mobile Me. Daring Fireball points out that there is a new string inside one of iCal’s resource files hinting that .Mac will indeed be getting a new name, although it remains unknown what it will be.

These two facts go nicely together, sure, but isn’t it just as likely that Apple, like many other international companies, would snap up any new top-level domain before the squatters get hold of it? Indeed, Macworld lists Microsoft, MTV and BMW as amongst the new owners of a .me domain. One extra discovery, found by Dmitry at the Coding Robots blog, is the glue that sticks this puzzle together. The picture above shows a line inside the iPhone 2.0 SDK.

We won’t let that stop us hoping, though. Here are four things we’d love to see from Mobile Me.

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