A couple days ago I wrote about Tencent’s surprise partnership with CNNIC to offer QQ users their own unique domain URLs. Yesterday, Tencent registered tens of thousands of .CN domains in preparation for the partnership, which will see the company offering free .CN domains to QQ users.
Users — some users, anyway — will be able to register their QQ numbers as .CN urls, and to this end, Tencent has registered all the previously unregistered domains from 10000.cn to 99999.cn, and from 100000.cn to 430581.cn. Presumably, Tencent plans to continue registering domains as many newer users have QQ numbers with more digits. (My latest QQ number, registered a month ago because I keep forgetting them, has nine digits).
That doesn’t mean these domains are available to users yet. This is just Tencent preparing for that eventuality by registering a whole buttload of domains. But the service should be coming pretty soon; Tencent QQZone boss Xie Xian has told reporters that the first stage of the project will be launched before the end of September. It’s not clear whether all users will be able to register their unique domains at that time, or whether some may have to wait until later.
Still, this is a lot of time and money for Tencent and CNNIC to put into what seems to amount to being more or less just a fun gimmick for most QQ users. There’s no word yet on whether or not Tencent will be trying out some kind of value-added service to go along with the launch, or adding something like that on at a later date. For now all we know is that pretty soon, lots of QQ users are going to be able to get .CN accounts with their names on them. That’s not much, but it’s kind of cool.
[National Business Daily via Sina Tech, Image source]
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