Couple days ago, I registered or.in. How awesome is that!? Today, I don’t have it. Just in case you happen to be reading this and somehow don’t know how large an internet nerd I am, I am a large internet nerd. This would be a life achievement. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, owns the singular and unavoidably memorable ma.tt. He inspired me to try. See what he did? He’s didn’t get a .com (cause he’s not a company), nor a .org (he’s not an organization) and not a .name neither (cause anyone who registers anything with that domain is a sucker). Those .coms, .orgs, and .names are collectively called Top Level Domains, or TLDs, and there’s a lot of them. Most of them are for countries, which have the privilege of using only two letters. Every .tv and .fm you’ve ever been to? They’re actually licensed from Tuvalu and, yes, the Federated States of Micronesia (which, interestingly, has one and only one FM radio station¹). But how did Matt happen to luck upon a .tt? It’s the assigned country code (ccTLD) domain for Trinidad and Tobago. He paid $500 a year for it. Yikes. It’s their ccTLD; they can charge whatever they want. That clever little trick of using both sides of the dot is known as a domain hack, and they’re pretty neat. Not only does it save on typing, it’s more memorable, simple yet exotic, and… well, special. What web-addict doesn’t dream of having the coolest dot-anything? I do. This was actually the latest big disappointment in a string of small ones.

It started slowly, last December, with a single, simple, unanswered, email…