The intent of this new domain is to let people register third-level domains, like john.smith.name, rather than second-level domains as in the other global TLDs.
.name strikes me as a silly thing to use for this purpose -- aren't all domain names names? Well, actually, they're addresses, but they're also names. I would have preferred the earlier proposal for .per for personal domains; this would be properly analogous to the other three-letter TLDs standing for other categories of users such as "commercial", "military", etc.