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."

Comments

I'm happy the way it is...

[eet23]

...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.

Good

[ViXX0r]

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.

Their idea was nothing new...

[PepsiProgrammer]

Any one ever heard of 'AOL keywords' same concept, Something like this needs to happen, but it needs to be standardized

Re:I didn't even know this was possible...

[Ron Bennett]

I get about 200 hits per month through via a keyword - it's a trademarked madeup word. Many people I suspect simply forget the .com part and then after seeing they're still being routed properly to our site due to RealNames, they use it more and tell others. So in this regard, keywords do have some value in regards to convenience.

But as far as driving traffic, etc...keywords are generally a poor way to do it...keywords don't work the same everywhere...for example AOL keywords and RealNames don't correspond with each other...if RealNames had any sense, they should have gotten AOL aboard - perhaps they tried...but in any event, keywords lacked consistency and thus most companies, etc simply stayed with internet domain names - they're familiar to people, consistent for the most part, and much less expensive since RealNames also charged surcharges for high volume sites.

So all in all, I'm glad to see RealNames fail...and it serves VeriSign right too - they're about the worst company on the face of the planet...heck, look at what they did to two decent services GreatDomains and Registrars.com after they acquired them...but I digress...

misguided

[tps12]

The whole thing was doomed to failure. Look back at the original plans of Arpanet (the precursor to the Internet, documents available at the Library of Congress). URLs were never meant to be easy to remember. They are a technical device intended to allow addresses to reflect physical network layouts more intuitively than do IP addresses.

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.

Not the dumbest idea yet by far....

[NDPTAL85]

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.

Re:I am sure they cancelled because it wasnt worki

[bluemountain]

Not quite. Check out www.teare.com. Has the full story.

Hightowertech

[Anonymous Coward]

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.