The Isle of Man has the .IM tld for their country/island and a lot of the IM clients, plus others, are setting up their domains with .IM in the end. Why? I dunno, must be a fad or something.

Typically though the mainstream user doesn’t know, or care, about these things unless told about them. Only about a few million internet users would even bother to think it’s “cool”, of course this is the population of the “Web 2.0″ side of the Internet.

Roundup of .IM domain names that have an IM service

Meebo.IM – is a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere. Whether you’re at home, on campus, at work, or traveling foreign lands, hop over to meebo.com on any computer to access all of your buddies (on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber) and chat with them, no downloads or installs required, for free!

Web.IM – It belongs to Yahoo Messenger. You all know what Yahoo Messenger is right?

Pidgin.IM – Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once.

Pidgin can work with: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr. Version 2.0.1 has been released fixing over 100 bugs.

Portal.IM – I can’t understand the language here.

Coccinella.IM - Coccinella is a free and open-source cross-platform chat client with a built-in whiteboard for improved collaboration with other people. It doesn’t support Vista yet. Features include -

• File transfer
• Multi-User Chat
• Secured connections
• Avatars and emoticons
• Open standard instant messaging
• Multi-lingual and internationalized

Imo.IM – Just launched in alpha stage, two new features are

• First, if you sign into more than one account you can link your accounts. When you link your accounts, logging into any one of your linked accounts will automatically sign you into the other accounts.
• Second new feature is group chat. This is a little different than traditional group chat. IMO group chat works across the different networks which means that in a single group chat you can have buddies from AIM, Google Talk, MSN, and Yahoo

That’s all I could find. If you know of any more then drop a comment. I did fine here.im – supposedly the next killer idea. Don’t we all have one idea each?

Most of these domain extensions in the end confuse internet users, a case in point is amie.st they now redirect to amiestreet.com. So for someone to do some real business having another TLD should be more about applying a cosmetic layer to their service rather than being the primary advertised destination. Simply because most of the internet users just don’t get it.

If you want to register your own .IM then this is where you can do so.

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About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.