The widely anticipated launch of the .ME domain on Thursday made waves across the Internet, and some of those waves were negative. Over here at Tucows, all systems were go, and resellers were able to register names without difficulty as soon as the Registry opened for business. All in all, it was a successful launch from our perspective.

No so for Go Daddy, they caught some heat on the tech-blog TechCrunch which broke the story that “many users [had] reported getting confirmations (and credit card charges) for their domains, only to receive the following cancellation notice about an hour later.”

And the social networking news blog Mashable picked up the story saying, “it appears GoDaddy is buckling under the pressure and is about to have an ugly mess on its hands.”

GoDaddy later responded to the Mashable blog post saying that the problems were as a result of “system issues in our communication with the registry.” GoDaddy will, of course, refund customers who had failed registrations.

Even today, a Twitter search reveals many unhappy GoDaddy customers who thought they had registered sweet .ME domains and have since been told otherwise.

At 1500 UTC today, the .ME Registry opens for business. You can check http://tinyurl.com/melaunch to find the time where you are. The .ME domain is the ccTLD assigned to Montenegro, a small country in Southeastern Europe. Like Tuvalu with their .TV domain, Montenegro is a small country that sees potential value in the .ME extension and is hoping for similar success. There are no residency or citizenship requirements for .ME domains.

As you would expect, OpenSRS is ready to go at launch. If you are a Tucows Domains Reseller, you’re all set to start selling.

According to the .ME Registry, including both sunrise and landrush, a total of more than 30,000 domains have already been registered. Auctions for names with more than one competing buyer are taking place now.

The Registry also set aside a list of premium names that will be auctioned off later in the year. The list includes names like love.me and buy.me among others. Lists of both the premium names that will be auctioned, and reserved names that won’t be allowed to be registered, are available at the Registry website.