Slashdot Mirror
RealNames Closing Shop
The_THOMAS writes: "The company RealNames, which tried to make a buck off of the domain name gold rush by adding their own layer on top of the ICANN system, is going out of business (Full story here). To review, the RealNames system is a browser plugin which redirects a user who types 'cookies' in the IE address bar to Nabisco.com. The reason for the closure appears to be the decision by M$ to NOT renew their agreement with RealNames which expires in June."
...at least with OmniWeb (and presumably other browsers) where I can set up my own keywords to go to a site rather than relying on someone else's based on what they paid.
I just use google and hit "Im feeling lucky" and I usally find what I need.
I mean, I feel sorry for the employees of another failing dotcom company, but really - I thought this was a dumb idea in the first place. If you need a plugin to remember how to get to your favorite web sites, then get off the 'net.
Hopefully they'll find something else to do that's actually useful.
University - a box of academia nuts.
I've been using computers for twenty years, and Windows since 3.0, but I didn't even know it was possible to just type keywords into the IE address bar... I wonder how many people out there did?
Granted, I use Netscape a lot more now, but still...
libertarianswag.com
Good god. $100,000,000 invested in the buisness plan of a company that produces absolutely nothing, the only possible appeal of which would be to allow the redirection of someone on a particular browser platform (who is too stupid to understand .com or use a search engine) to your site, for which you would pay them up to 500 a year.
Unbelievable. Thank reason that's all behind us.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Stupid investors. End of story. Kiss that $100M goodbye.
Ignoring the stupidity of their entire business strategy, it's no surprise that they went over.
:)
The article says they had 80 employees. 80! I would say that at max, they'd need a few sales people, a few programmers, a designer, a tech support person, management, and a receptionist. That's 20 people at most. Instead, they've got 80 people.
I bet that half of their employees are browsing Slashdot all day.
qslack.com
HA HA!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Any one ever heard of 'AOL keywords' same concept, Something like this needs to happen, but it needs to be standardized
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Looks like Microsoft beat these morons to the punch on this one (and probably Netscape before so). Just like Netscape used to redirect non-sites to Netcenter Search, IE by default sends queries to MSN Search---but in IE's prefrences, that is configurable; for example, I have mine set to Google.
This software sounds like something that would have to be installed covertly. I'll stick with IE's feature, thanks.
What if I like Keebler better than Nabisco?
I wonder if this is happening because of google.
After all, in IE, you may use google's taskbar to provide a keyword-search right there on your browser. And in Mozilla, you have the sidebar with google enabled. So why bother using 'keywords' to search for stuff when you have something much more stable in google?
In any event, they probably shouldn't have tried to put so many eggs in the Microsoft basket. Yet, I'm unsure they would have had much choice... where else could they have gone?
Hmm.. and Microsoft wishes to convince folks that a monopoly such as theirs is a *good* thing?
And so it goes.
And how much time will elapse before RealNames has brought another anti-trust suit...? ;)
Why would Micro$oft cancel the contract? Do they not need redirection based on keywords anymore? Or did the programmer they keep in the basement all of a sudden figure out how to make IE redirect based on keywords without RealNames?
libertarianswag.com
However, there is a second, more subtle effect to Microsoft's dominance of the PC software industry: they have the power and funding they need to prop up unprofitable ventures that serve only to increase their stranglehold over PC consumers. Take the RealNames scenario, for instance: Microsoft was able to compete with the Internic registry[1] only because they could afford to bleed money for several years without hurting. In this case, the market prevailed and RealNames collapsed. However, this isn't always the case. Take a look at Internet Explorer: for many years it was inferior to Netscape's offering, and only recently has Mozilla again surpassed it in speed and usability. IE never made a single red cent for Microsoft, but their monopoly position and cash reserves were used to force it down users' throats. And that, my friends, is why Microsoft endangers the entire software industry and desperately needs increased government oversight. Judge Jackson ruined our first chance to fight back, but hopefully the DoJ will not give up that easily.
[1] I am not endorsing ICANN or their corporatist interests, but their system is clearly superior to RealNames' undemocratic process.
That is pure genius. Next thing you know we will have the ability to visit webpages by typing in a "URL" into the address bar.
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait, he does.
Aww...does this mean I actually have to type in www.farmlove.com now?
Let's see, this is talking about RealNames' largest investor and how companies like RealNames hurt the industry, and it's marked Offtopic? Mods on crack...
In Danish papers not long ago, it was reported that the the company and its partners had oversold their service to danish municipalities, which received lots of negative coverage.
The people at the company defended themselves, saying their service provided great value, and the municipality officials said they were confident about their purchases.
With this shit, some people are getting their asses burned.. and a lot of people will say "I told you so".
What now? will all the current customers lose their services or will Microsoft take over business?
my comment: HA HA.. damn I hate you sploiters!!!
So let me guess, Microsoft is deciding to "embrace and replace", errr, I mean, "embrace and entend" and do this this themselves. Yet another competitor/partner made redundant by the monolith. Sigh.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
MY question is, whatever happened to the ORIGINAL RealNames? Once upon a time it was basically a search engine to find corporations' websites. For example: the large, national "Dick's Sporting Goods" is *not* at "dicks.com", it's at "dickssportinggoods.com". Once upon a time, RealNames woulda told you that - and most any other company you wanted to find.
I'm a 2000 man.
RealNames had an icky business, but nevertheless what this also goes to show, is that bedding with Microsoft is a dangerous game.
Never base your business on another business like Microsoft. You'll be enslaved.
Yes I am probably being a bit picky, but seriously, using M$ instead of MS is getting really old. If M$ is to be the way we spell it then I suggest spelling Linux as [h4h4h4, I pwnz0r j00 suxxz0rz!1!1!]
*BSD should be: [j00 st00pid "h4h4h4, I pwnz0r j00 suxxz0rz!1!1!" n00bs! we pwn j00 4ll!!!11!111!!1!1]
This way it will be more consistent and easier to understand just which company or OS someone is referring to, thank you for your cooperation
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
how the hell do I get to nabisco's site now?
Couldn't you just setup an alias in the Windows host file that would do the exact same thing. Christ, for 3 minutes you could have an application that could do this.
Of course, these have been abused since the web took off. A great example is slashdot: apple.slashdot.org is not necessarily a different machine than bsd.slashdot.org, and either one or both may be multiple machines in RL.
URLs are not targetted at end-users, who should be dealing with bookmarks and search engines to access business names.
Basically, RealNames was a kluge that won't be missed; good riddance, I say.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The reason for the closure appears to be the decision by M$ to NOT renew their agreement with RealNames which expires in June
Sounds like another Microsoft ploy to me. M$ likes to keep a tight leash on stupid users, part of what makes the company so successful. Since there are options in IE to do similar feats, why not kill the companies you can, and reap the rewards yourself?
Type in 'cookies' in IE and it takes you here. If more keyword searches would take you to non-commercial sites like this one, maybe people would actually end up using them more often.
I'm glad they are gone. Many names could not be purchased and their fee structure sucked - IMHO.
And to top it off they could not protect their customer database and compromised every one of their customer's credit cards.
I never actually used their service, but made inquiries in the past, for names that I found they would let no one purchase. Some common terms could not be purchased. Even inquiries required giving them a credit card number. And eventhough I never signed up, there was no way to remove my card from their database afterward. I did not know they kept it stored and when they were hacked I had to get a new card number FAST.
I hope no such service is ever made again!
I always though that this site was a truly inspired idea! For anyone who hasn't been there, you just put some godawful long URL in there, and it translates it to a reasonably small URL (the URL actually goes to their server, then is redirected to the real site after a couple of seconds). No adverts, simple to use, works great!
:-)
(No, I don't have anything to do with running the site
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
At the back of this "DOMAIN EXPIRATION NOTICE", there was a block of tiny little print that gave the scam away.
Just out of curiosity, what did the tiny little print say? Was it "THIS IS A SCAM" or something?
(On an entirely different subject, "Slow down, Cowboy" is really getting on by nerves. I don't have a better suggestion, but Slashcode seems to take particular pleasure from punishing those of us who know what we wanna say and type fast. Of course, it's even worse when I post from the office (gasp!) with IE on Windows. Once you hit the "submit" button, your post is gone, gone, gone. If you get a "slow down cowboy" or other error, the "back" button is suicide. Okay, that killed about enough time I suppose.)
This is the ultimate in paid-for searching and I'm glad this psuedo-search is going off the air. While google remains free and doesn't change its search results for advertising money, this corporate handshaking is simply obselete and consumers are better off without it.
Nice of the editors to get in an MS jab for not supporting a bad business plan. Not to mention plain names like 'cookies' shouldnt resolve to web sites if theres a server or pc on your network called cookies.
MS not only had an agreement to use realnames they had a put a lot of capital in that company.
When they realized it wasnt gaining market share they decided to get out.
I suppose, because we've all got as far as /., we're all pretty experienced net users. But not everyone out there is and the idea behind this company doesn't seem too dumb.
(Though obviously it doesn't work.)
I well remember being told by someone that my web site didn't exist because when they typed in the url they got nothing back.
On closer examination it turned out they were typing the url into yahoo. They knew nothing else about the web (they were an important UK journalist) and presumably sombody had just made yahoo their home page left them to it.
In that sort of world, somebody doing the searching for them might have worked.
RealNames changes name to FakeNames and releases new adware software to screw with DNS entries
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
This is a good thing. Not only did the business provide little if any value (Memorizing keywords to get to sites? That's what hostnames *are*!), but it was attempting to make a new namespace that would only be visible to IE users. I'm very glad it didn't catch on. If it did, we might have started seeing sites that didn't bother registering names in the DNS standard way and instead just mapped their IP addresses to this goofy scheme. Thank reason that didn't happen.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Internet TLDs mean nothing, they contribute no extra information. Slashdot.org is the same as Slashdot.com.
.com. This is a "feature" that AOL provides as well.
.TV or .ORG. And suddenly some of your clients are wondering when you got into the porn business.
.com from the vernacular of the internet.
The reason RealNames got so much money is that it was actually conceivable that people might just prefer not to have to type
I for one, would so much prefer to do away with TLDs altogether. Give Nabisco COOKIES if they want it. TLDs lead only to user confusion and annoyance as some bozo buys up YOURCOMPANY.NET or
Maybe TLDs would be useful if they meant something. But as it is right now, they're meaningless and a nuisance for site owners and web users. Apparently, enough was thought of this nuisance that they were able to raise $100M on the promise of removing
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Does thing mean that MS no longer has an excuse to record every mistyped domain name along with a unique ID in IE?
Nah, I'm sure they will continue to collect that data. After all, this is MS we are talking about.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Seriously, how many people need to be on staff to operate a web business like that? A little software could manage thier whole outfit. They got rich, lost thier M$ account, and are now closing because thier get-rich-quick scheme is over. I could run that operation by myself in the evening :p
pretzel_logic
Netscrape had something called "Internet Keywords" that did roughly the same thing. Is that still in use?
It said if you followed the instructions on the other side of the paper, your domain would be transferred to verisign, and you would be bound to terms and conditions that were at some urls they listed.
I coulda sold my /etc/hosts?...
it might have been nice to get to slashdot by just typing in "/."
and to get the microsoft site by typing in "you bastards"
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Type "farmlove" in the address bar, then hit CTRL-ENTER and it will take you to your favorite site. That is, unless you have picked up gohip or something in your pr0n searches.
Over five years ago I wrote this column in which I offered Bill Gates a "billion dollar" idea to help him achieve his goal of taking over the Internet.
Perhaps the situation with RealNames is just a precursor to the implementation of this plan by Billy-boy?
I bet if they weren't so worried about anti-trust laws, Microsoft would have already done this.
Looks to me like lots of goats were involved.
Keebler is owned by NABISCO!
Keebler.com's brands page, I see no evidence of any affiliation with Kraft Foods, Nabisco's parent company. In turn, Kraft's parent company is Altria.
I don't buy Nabisco because 1. I don't like to support big tobacco and big booze (two other divisions of Altria), and 2. I simply prefer Keebler's products to Nabisco's.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know we're all laughing at how stupid the RealNames business plan is but I can remember a company that had a worse one.
I can't remember the name of the company but their plan was to give each individual website and webpage its own phone number. They claimed it would be simpler for people to remember phone numbers for websites than URL's. Each extra page on a site would be like an extension to the phone number. Needless to say this company soon went out of business.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Type "ss" or "sas" in Knoquorer and guess which site redirects you to another...
Read the complete story about what happened, way interesting...
sacrafic YOUR karma AC... ok ok there goes mine :)
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Netscrape had something called "Internet Keywords" that did roughly the same thing.
RealNames dominates the first page of results from search for "Internet Keywords". But I'm not sure if Netscape's system was the same or not. Current versions of Mozilla (1.0 RC2) simply surround single words with www.$1.com.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Lets make this open source
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
On an entirely different subject, "Slow down, Cowboy" is really getting on by nerves.
This has been addressed in a forum where it is more on-topic.
See sid=32473&cid=3504364 for the answer.
> IE never made a single red cent for Microsoft, but their monopoly position and cash reserves were used to force it down users' throats.
IE was originally developed by SpyGlass (their copyright appears on it) yet SpyGlass never made a red cent off IE either.
MS offered a contract whereby SpyGlass collected a fee for every copy of IE sold. Guess what: MS never 'sold' it. Consequently SpyGlass never got any money at all.
MS doesn't just shove down users throats, it also operates at the other end for 'partners'.
Of course IE became 'bundled' and inseparable from Windows and so must be a component of the sale price, but I'll bet that MS has still not sent any money to SpyGlass.
Not quite. Check out www.teare.com. Has the full story.
I guess the browser-redirection market wasn't big enough to support them AND CueCat.
Yeah, right, like I really wanted to type in "computers" and not know whether I was going to Dell's site (best case scenario) or HP's site (worst case scenario). RealNames's technology was even slightly useful only to newbies who have no clue about how to use the Internet.
Me, I'll find my information without some idiotic little keywords system getting in my way. I'm not shedding even a tear in memory of RealNames. Good riddance! The Internet has been saved from another stupid technology.
Want Slashdot headlines on your site? Try SlashHead
I thought "cookies" took you to Jennnifer.com??
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Last week, a company called hightowertech (not a plug) called us and tried to pitch their service, which is exactly the same as Realnames. Said they were affiliated with Microsoft.
Their idea was at it's heart a good one with a bad marketing department on top if it. Look at it this way: If there were a plugin that let people fairly and freely hook up text names to their computer(s) that were hooked to the internet and a central registry or something handled this pseudo DNS through another protocol name other than http maybe althttp:// or something, I don't know, then this could be a huge step towards openness compared to the current system...They just tried to commercialize it too much and it failed....If the words were not so much designed to be easy to remember as they were designed to provide an alternative identification mechanism to ICANN then the system would have been less defeatable (also would have helped if they natively supported as many browsers as possible)
Brian
Closest I could find was ringmysite.com. Apparently, they would let visitors enter your phone number at their site and be autoforwarded to yours. Not a bad idea to me, really, reusing your own phone number that is.
What I *thought* you were referring to was the spam that has web URLs shown as long numeric sequences. I once read about a business that offered phone number forwarders specifically because its easier for WAP phone users to enter phone numbers than alpha URLs. Well, a little research has shown that those purely numeric domains are simply an exploit against DNS resolvers. Those "domain names" are calculated by converting the dotted quad IP addresses to hex, concatenating the four fields, and converting the now 8-digit hex value into base 10. From the linked google hit, try pinging 1078106110. It works, and is the same length as a North American phone numbers (but is technically not valid).
I say "exploit" because the freakish domain names fail in reverse lookups, which makes them popular with spammers. Granted, a ping reveals the calculated IP which may or may not complete a reverse lookup, but I'm *still* teaching someone "ping" at least once a week.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I type "my yahoo" instead of "my.yahoo.com" and Netscape 6 (I bet 4.x too) sends me to my.yahoo.com, I always thought it was a Realnames&Netscape thing such as "what's related" is a Alexa&Netscape thing.
So it will be affected? Not?
deal in vapourdata, get ingited.
On his private web page, RealNames founder Keith Teare sez M$ will probably integrate the functionality directly into IE.
Why am I not surprised at this?
A message from our sponsor
if they had given 100 mil to debian and kde.
every business in American would have free software
to run their business for the next century.
what a waste.
The love of money, not money itself is the root of all evil.
Timothy 6:10 "For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains."
King James gives: " For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."
New International reads: " For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs."
(OOT [on off=topic]) I despise Microsoft as much as the next penguinista, but the "M$" thing is puerile. Grow up.
____
The lack of money is the root of all evil --Mark Twain
I think it'd be a great move for M$ to cancel their aggreement w/ Real Names.. b/c wouldn't they rather take the "registration fees" from nabisco, rather than let Real Names take them?
.. how about "IE KEYWORD" ?!
I mean.. ever heard of "AOL KEYWORD"
Nesta
This is about 10 days old ffs http://comments.fuckedcompany.com/phpcomments/inde x.php?newsid=86419&page=1&parentid=0&crapfilter=1
According to the terae.com article, it looks like a typical microsoft tactic, shutdown a company then copy its services. Gee, that anti-trust suit does not seem to be slowing them down one bit.
.NET is being pushed, sold, and shoved onto companies; if microsoft is moving away from the .NET strategy, then they are shooting themselves in the foot, and all the pushing, selling, and shoving is all for naught. It will make some early adopters of .NET look foolish, and make even more people upset (besides the newest critics: ex-employees of realnames, investors of realnmaes and compnies that had keywords sold by realnames).
Also microsoft
Agreed. MS has integrated much more complex ideas in the past. This one is trivial if MS wants to do it themselves -- and MS doesn't need to muck with any kind of expensive and awkward transition by buying RealNames.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The usefulness of RealNames was when a most familiar brand did not match up with the domain name. For example: "Nissan" isn't at nissan.com
However, once Google was able to pick out the famous brand's website, automatically by reverse-citation, and then Google Toolbar, Mozilla, Opera put this searching direct from the browser url box, a type-in of "Nissan" into the browser's address bar search box would jump to nissanmotors.com directly, without the company having to pay any toll to RealNames at all.
Thus, RealNames long-term revenue prospects dried up. Closing up shop was inevitable.
I won't miss them much, as they had a policy of no generic keyword names, but then broke that policy every time one of their partner sites needed a generic keyword.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
Just go to a site, select Favorites/Add to Favorties and write to the site name your preferred short cut entry (for example go to www.nabisco.com and add it as a "cookies" favorite).
This way your shortcut entry refers to an actual URL, not a host plus this needs no meddling in system hosts file.
because the important thing is this: the executives got million-dollar paycheques. That made it all worthwhile!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.teare.com/
'Nice to blame all in sight, so as to divert attention from the fact that Registries and Registrars, also their Re-sellers (The same people Teare now refers to for the purposes of raising sympathy!) were being screwed by RealNames on an ongoing basis! Note that the product has been completely changed in nature and that that is the real reason for the demise - it was not going to fly! Changes include upping the price tenfold, pasting advertising on clients and users' screens, no search engine functionality other than on MSN, almost no media profile whatsoever. Worst of all, clients who bought the original (Better) product and invested in all sorts of material and media, were screwed no end, what with being forced to buy at the old price times ten! That is if they could get the Keyword. Imagine what this does to a Registry/Registrar/Re-sellers relationships with current clients. Lastly, their tracking and billing systems are so useless, they were not able to generate an accurate account in more than a year's time. Conveniently so perhaps, given the fact that the franchises (We contracted for 32 countries, some as Registries, others as Registrars and spent millions on roll-outs)they sold us referred to 300 times the number of active clients/words and totally ridiculous revenue models. 'Buyer beware' I hear - but they used the names of Microsoft and Verisign, Morgan Stanley and all the rest in sight to support their claims. We have tried to resolve issues for months, travelling around the world twice, lobbying, declaring disputes and now proceeding to court and in the process have found huge numbers of disgruntled parties, accross the spectrums mentioned. Feel free to contact me at cobus@keywordssa.co.za if you feel you can contribute or gain by doing so. Stop crying and start telling the whole story Keith Teare!
how should i navigate the web to find the right resource if:
1. i want a dishwasher and i live in ny?
2. i want a dishwasher and i heard that bosch is a good brand, but i don't know the url for bosch's website?
3. i want to know about bosch but i want other choices?
seems to me that the DNS won't work if bosch doesn't own bosch.com, that realnames wont work if any private company owns the realname DISHWASHER (or if another bosch owns BOSCH), and that pay-per-performance only tells me who has the largest advertising budget.
The problem is not the business model.
It's a fine idea to let users type keywords or names in order to go to the site they want.
The stupid part is the assumption that someone else can manually make the appropriate mapping between keywords and sites.
Google is so good because it fundamentally doesn't rely on this (even when the "submit my site" feature and meta tags trick webmasters into believing that it does).