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. $100,000,000 invested in the buisness plan of a company that produces absolutely nothing, the only possible appeal of which would be to allow the redirection of someone on a particular browser platform (who is too stupid to understand .com or use a search engine) to your site, for which you would pay them up to 500 a year.
Unbelievable. Thank reason that's all behind us.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Ignoring the stupidity of their entire business strategy, it's no surprise that they went over.
:)
The article says they had 80 employees. 80! I would say that at max, they'd need a few sales people, a few programmers, a designer, a tech support person, management, and a receptionist. That's 20 people at most. Instead, they've got 80 people.
I bet that half of their employees are browsing Slashdot all day.
qslack.com
HA HA!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/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
That money's not all gone -- most of it probably went to the upper echelon investors, people who have invested in the home industry (buying their $5 million houses), the hobbiest airline industry, the expensive car industry, and whatever is left was probably reinvested back into the stock market in companies that hopefully could use the money to benefit us all.
Even a failure can trickle down to helping others who didn't have a foot in the door in a bad idea that duped a lot of investors...
(The free market at work. Even the rich help the poor).
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.
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.
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?
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...
Actually, it seems to me that it's a moderator's rejection of the late trend that everything on Slashdot is about how bad Microsoft is.
I tried to find a recent article that had no comments above 0 about how Microsoft is bad, but I came up with nothing.
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)
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!
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.
Thank you! When I opened up this news story I was worried for a minute that I didn't see any sterotypical anti-MS attacks.
Thank you for not allowing me to be disappointed.
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.
It's not a late trend. It's been going on as long as I've been reading slashdot (which is longer than my ID# would have you believe).
Microsoft is bad.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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!
I agree. Typing in "French Tutorial" and going to a specific site might prove useful for people wanting to limit results. In schools, you don't want kids wasting time on the Internet searching for the site that you asked them to find. Not everybody has a creative short name for their url.
This way, you don't need one, if the audience is limited. It could also be seen as a semi-equivalent command line interface to make use of bookmarks. It may actually be easier to type "Fr tutor", short for "French Tutorial", instead of going through countless folders and such to search for your bookmarks.
As long as everybody is aware of its strengths and limitations, then this tool is of value to those who can use it.
testing out my trending skills
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.
Netscrape had something called "Internet Keywords" that did roughly the same thing. Is that still in use?
Take head my son, Google itself holds the answer to this and many questions.
I'm seriously considering founding a religion based around google.
btw, rather than screw with registry settings to make IE conform, may I suggest you use Opera. It comes pre-configured to search google and many others. I use Opera with Javascript etc. turned off and only load IE when I find a page the requires that stuff. That system seems to work well.
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.
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.
Not quite. Check out www.teare.com. Has the full story.
mod parent up -- first-hand testimony
I typed in cookies in Opera of FreeBSD and it took me to
clevercookies.com.
Hm....does opera use realnames?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I thought "cookies" took you to Jennnifer.com??
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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
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
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.
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