Back in April 2009, we wrote about Automattic purchasing WP.com. At the time there was a lot of speculation about what the role of this incredible new domain would be.  It has now been a few months since they took over possession and it looks like we finally have some hints about what the role of this domain may be.

As of the publishing of this post, it looks like WP.com still redirects to WordPress.com, but if you visit their Get WordPress subdomain, you can see the following splash page promoting their hosted service, as well as a quick comparison to WordPress.org:

It will be interesting to see what they decide to do with the root of the domain.   I can’t help but wonder if it would be a good idea to move WordPress.com to a shorter domain like WP.com, giving their bloggers a smaller URL for their hosted blogs. In the age of Twitter it would be nice to have a domain like xxxx.wp.com instead of xxxx.wordpress.com.

What would you like to see WP.com ultimately used for?

Being a long time domainer, I’ve always understood the value of a strong domain name.   It can literally make or break a product before it even launches!     Automattic appears to understand domains as well, and wants to protect their brand.   In a brilliant move, it seems they recently completed the purchase of WP.com, the common abbreviation for WordPress, which was previously owned by Yahoo.

Here is what Matt had to say about the acquisition of WP.com:

Yes it’s true, Automattic is now the proud owner of WP.com, which we acquired from our buddies over at Yahoo! We’ve been using WP.com as internal shorthand for this site for years now, and ever since we figured out four or five years ago that Yahoo had that domain (as opposed to the Washington Post or something) we’ve been doing our best to get it, a journey that culminated in ultimate success a few days ago.

WP.com seemed like a great fit: people’s attention spans are getting shorter every day.  Wow the weather is great in San Francisco today. Also it’s seven keystrokes shorter to type in, which multiplied by the hundreds of millions of times people visit the site every year will be a huge productivity boost to our troubled economy and prevent RSI in a large percentage of the population.

Matt has also thrown a question out to the WordPress community.    What should they do with this outstanding domain name?   You can leave a comment on their post here with your suggestion!

My recommendation?   People are going completely mobile these days for everything and that trend is only going to continue over time.   After seeing what is in store for the iPhone 3.0 and the BlackBerry Storm 2.0, I am as convinced of this as ever.   At the same time, people are also loving Twitter and sending Tweets from their phones.

Why not take WP.com and build it into a mobile blogging platform, or a Twitter competitor of some sort that ties into your WordPress.com blog?     What other ideas do you guys have?

Note: It appears Automattic has also acquired Blo.gs.  It will be interesting to see if they decide to try to improve or somehow integrate this service.