The Only Two Letter .ME Domain In The World

So says Matt Mullenweg in his official WordPress.com blog post announcing that the new domain, WP.me would be host to shortened URL’s for users of WordPress.com. According to the post:

• WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
• Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
• These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink.
• It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
• The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
• WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

Now for those of you wondering if the WordPress.org side of things will be able to tap into this URL shortener, the good news is Yes. However, you will need to use the WordPress.com stats plugin in order to do so. This means that the URL shortener is pretty much limited to WordPress users only and not to external parties. I have installed the WordPress.com stats plugin and at this moment, there is no button to shorten URL’s so I imagine at some point down the line, it will make it’s way into the write panel.

I as well as many others thought that WP.com would be perfect to use as a URL shortening service but alas, it was not to be. At least with WP.me, they cut one more character off of the domain.