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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."
I just use google and hit "Im feeling lucky" and I usally find what I need.
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.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
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It has been. They're called domain names. They're supposed to make remembering hosts easier by not having to remember the numeric IP address. It's just some people have abused this system or used it incorrectly resulting in a less valuable resource for all.
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, what would I do? I would go to Google and type in cookies there. That's it.
That's a silly argument; TLDs are quite often meaningful, and useful, as long as they're used correctly. Of course, in the rabid world of commercial entities trying to grab all mindshare, the usefulness of the system often gets trampled.
.edu and .gov), so those are obviously the most focused and meaningful.
.edu). This would even help the existing TLDs a bit, by freeing up namespace currently used for `keywords' for use by real organizations.
... and no, you can't have coke.net, because you're a pr0n-meister trying to leech off of users' innocent mistakes!' Based on what happened in Australia, I guess it's not going to happen though...]
Most of the (original) TLDs describe types of organizations so they're obviously the most useful when your site is that of one. Some TLDs contain mostly organizational host names (like
`slashdot' doesn't name an organization at all so naturally it doesn't fit well into the system.
The problems with TLDs mostly seem to be caused by the attempts to ignore them, trying to get around user cluelessness by using `.com' as a sort of `constant suffix for keywords'. This attempt to pretend that that domain names are handy keywords seems pretty hopeless (there's too much conflict), but I suppose people aren't going to stop doing it.
I wish they'd just allow domain names without TLDs for this sort of `keyword' usage, allowing the TLDs to remain for domain names where they're useful (especially
[Of course, I also wish the DNS admins would enforce some sort of `reasonableness', e.g., `no, you can't have coke.net, you're already coke.com!
We live, as we dream -- alone....