CNNIC is working on replacing .com as the TLD with the most domain registrations within the next months

Tencent Partners with CNNIC to Offer Unique .CN User Domains

By C. Custer on 4th September 2012

Chinese tech giant Tencent came out with a rather surprising announcement yesterday: thanks to a partnership with CNNIC, Tencent QQ users will be able to bind their QQ accounts to their own personal .CN domain. Visiting that domain will take you directly to the relevant user’s QQZone page. QQ users will also be given a free email address at their personalized domain. (CNNIC, of course, is the agency under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) that is responsible for — among other things — registry of all .CN domain names).

From media reports, it sounds like users will have to opt-in to the domain service, and they won’t be able to get any domain they want. Instead, everyone’s “personalized” domain will be their QQ number. So, for example, if your QQ number is 137483503 (a number I just made up), then your personalized domain would be 137483503.cn and you’d be able to receive mail at your_name_here@137483503.cn.
China has plenty of websites with long series of numbers in the URL, though, so it’s not clear whether CNNIC will be able to offer this service to all QQ users or whether there may be an unlucky few who are out of luck because their numbers have already been registered as domains by other companies.

The timing of the announcement is interesting, coming as it does in the middle of Baidu World, but it may just be a coincidence. Personally, I’m not sure how this is going to make things easier for anyone (it’s not like remembering all your friends’ nine-digit QQ numbers is a very high tech solution to making it easy for you to find their QQZone pages) but I guess some users will enjoy having their own .CN domains just for the “cool” factor. It will be interesting to see if other social media services (especially Sina Weibo) attempt to partner up with CNNIC and offer something similar in the future.

Source: Tech in Asia

By C. Custer on 7th September 2012

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.

Source: Yahoo

This solution would be a perfect fit for .tel, especially cooperating with Tencent.
Unfortunately the competition is not sleeping.

TelTalk wrote: ... Personally, I’m not sure how this is going to make things easier for anyone (it’s not like remembering all your friends’ nine-digit QQ numbers is a very high tech solution to making it easy for you to find their QQZone pages) but I guess some users will enjoy having their own .CN domains just for the “cool” factor ...

So QQ numbers for the population are 9 digits, so 383838768.cn would be a vanity url ? (Read your post too fast, you said your latest was 9-digit, could be any length, yes ?)



And what is QQ exactly ? Thanks ! ( Found this answer, pardon my ignorance - QQ is a free instant messaging computer program in China with over 700 million active user accounts. )

Telminator wrote:This solution would be a perfect fit for .tel, especially cooperating with Tencent.

Absolutely! Can you imagine Telnic would do the same with Skype or Facebook?

telrific wrote:QQ is a free instant messaging computer program in China with over 700 million active user accounts.

Conclusion: while .com has only about 100 million registrations, .cn could have almost 1 billion registrations soon.

Telnic needs only a strong partner and can accomplish the same!