Chinese tech giant Tencent came out with a rather surprising announcement yesterday: thanks to a partnership with CNNIC, Tencent QQ users will be able to bind their QQ accounts to their own personal .CN domain. Visiting that domain will take you directly to the relevant user’s QQZone page. QQ users will also be given a free email address at their personalized domain. (CNNIC, of course, is the agency under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) that is responsible for — among other things — registry of all .CN domain names).
From media reports, it sounds like users will have to opt-in to the domain service, and they won’t be able to get any domain they want. Instead, everyone’s “personalized” domain will be their QQ number. So, for example, if your QQ number is 137483503 (a number I just made up), then your personalized domain would be 137483503.cn and you’d be able to receive mail at your_name_here@137483503.cn.
China has plenty of websites with long series of numbers in the URL, though, so it’s not clear whether CNNIC will be able to offer this service to all QQ users or whether there may be an unlucky few who are out of luck because their numbers have already been registered as domains by other companies.
The timing of the announcement is interesting, coming as it does in the middle of Baidu World, but it may just be a coincidence. Personally, I’m not sure how this is going to make things easier for anyone (it’s not like remembering all your friends’ nine-digit QQ numbers is a very high tech solution to making it easy for you to find their QQZone pages) but I guess some users will enjoy having their own .CN domains just for the “cool” factor. It will be interesting to see if other social media services (especially Sina Weibo) attempt to partner up with CNNIC and offer something similar in the future.
[via TechWeb and this weibo account]
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