Back in the day, I co-founded a company that offered vanity e-mail addresses of the form firstname@lastname.some-tld. It eventually morphed into the .name registry. But what we did not realise, apart from misjudging demand, was how confused people get over this.

Even now, while I have my lastname.com that pre-dates that business by several years, I still have to spell out my e-mail address, often several times, to people who know my name. Trying to short-circuiting that process with "it's just my firstname at my lastname dot com" rarely works, and often ends up with them asking if is at gmail.com or something. So I dutifully spell it out, and many people noticeably don't make the connection between the domain name and my lastname even after they've written it down.

Familiarity is often far simpler.