Wordpress.com has just announced over the week-end that it’s giving away free domains on randomly selected Wordpress.com blogs.
Our most requested feature has nearly always been the ability to change a blog’s URL. We’ve been working on a system that lets you do just that and I am pleased to tell you that it is almost ready!
Just to clarify what I’m talking about, we are making it possible to give your WordPress.com blog a different URL. For example, your blog can live at yourdomain.com or blog.yourdomain.com instead of yourblog.wordpress.com.
Domain registration and mapping are sensitive, technical operations and we want these processes to be easy. To that end, the development and testing have to be thorough. While I was setting up test domains it occurred to me that I ought to set them up on live blogs rather than test blogs. The more traffic the systems gets during testing, the more confidently we can release the feature.
So here’s my idea: I’ll sneak into a few of your dashboards when you aren’t looking and give you a brand new domain based on your current one. If you like it, keep it as your blog URL until it expires or you renew it. If you don’t like it, you’ll be able to switch back to your wordpress.com domain. If you decide to keep it, all of your old URLs (permalinks) will still work. They’ll simply redirect visitors to the new URL.
That’s a nice feature to add which I think will convince a lot of WP.com bloggers to retain their blogs in the long haul.
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By the time wordpress will give free domain names to their users, i’ll switch to wordpress. In the mean time, i’ll enjoy the new features of blogger beta.
I doubt that they will give free domains. The vast majority of blogs out there can’t be monetized for ad revenue to cover their costs.
It will probably be a service feature.
Based on the blog post, it sounds a bit iffy - they will assign your free domain? Better if the wordpress.com user opts in for the raffle and proposes the domain.
Their announcement kinda mentioned only a handful domains to be given free on the first year (blogger will have to renew it when time comes). I guess it’s one way to beta-test this feature if its manageable when done in the thousands.
Too little, too late.
If they’ll let people integrate domains to WP.com, I’m considering to just have my domain directed there!
This move is not for the monetizing/adsense probloggers, but for the executive/enterprise/evangelist (triple E?) bloggers like Scoble.
It’s here. However it costs $10/yr. Agh.