Can we take a poll of anybody remembering coming across a .co in a natural search they were making? I sure haven't seen one.
you won't because .co is related to a specific geographical area... like .us or .uk or .in i think google takes this into consideration.... i live in india, and i have never come across any .us results on google till now, this is because google supplies results based on your location too.** ** purely based on assumptions.
.co made a deal with google to rank as a non-location based domain, just like .com/net/org - that's why they were supposed to be great - they gave you another shot at a location-generic domain for some tough terms. It's a lot more like .info in practice though The biggest problem with .co domains may be just that since they haven't been around as long, no one's really done too much work with them yet. I predict eventually you will see them as much as .info - not much, but ocasionally you will come across one.
my very unscientific experiment: search google for: site:.co I only found one .co above a PR5 - a Colombian newspaper (.co was originally location-bound to Colombia) - The Colombian newspaper had a PR6, and it had a lot more age than any of the other .co (presumably it was bought before the .co landrush)
.co was never getting the same par with .com - i guess the 'less is more' rule doesn't work on this one
.co looks like nothing more to me than a typo of .com and I am sure that is where all the traffic to these doms come from. Its like registering a wwwdomainname.com as a typo of www.domainname.com. Ridiculous
Whow! Do I give up IM because I can't get the TLD? Lame augment. Niche research comes before domain research.