To my knowledge so am I. There are about 500 or so that share my lastname worldwide, descending from two different families in Norway who both independently decided to change name from Hogstad to Hokstad to reduce confusion (because at the time there were lots of farms in their respective areas all named something with Hogstad).
So if anyone with the lastname Hokstad out there reads this: There's about a 50/50 chance we're related, and if we are I probably have your name on file;) (my late father was majorly into genealogy, and catalogued practically all Hokstad's related to us, living or dead).
I'm even worse. I couldn't remember my fiancees, my work or my moms number if my life depended on it. It's not that I've got a problem remembering numbers - I remember my bank account numbers etc. with no problems at all. The reason is simply that I never type the numbers in, I always use my cellphone either for the call itself or to look up whatever number I need.
Using numeric addressing on the internet as well is the last thing I'd want.
No, our business model is to target people that are willing to spend money for our product online without costing us a fortune in support and additional development work, namely mainstream consumers, as opposed to Slashdot users who in my experience (from past Slashdotting while working for other companies) are very demanding but does not have much willingness to pay.
Of course there are exceptions, and we saw a good increase in registrations both yesterday and today thanks to this Slashdot article, and some very nice customer service e-mails. And we're happy to help out people who need something slightly more advanced than what we currently offer in our web interface.
However, educating users is extremely expensive - it very rarely makes economic sense to even try, which means it's not often a viable path for a for profit business. It is much more cost effective and profitable to meet your customers at the level they are at and provide what they ask for, and most potential customers aren't anywhere near as technical as Slashdot users.
This is a matter of basic economics. Most people don't understand domain names, don't want to understand domain names and couldn't care less (certainly not enough to bother letting you "educate them"), as long as they get the service they want if they buy from us: an easy to remember e-mail address, and possibly web forwarding.
Re:640k is more than enough for anybody
on
Slashdot over IPv6
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· Score: 1
It's trivial to "fix". The point is that nothing that just understand older versions of IP will need to know which of the never versions it's dealing with, just that it's too new for it to understand. So all you have to do is say that any version that uses X and above in the version field have more version bits stored elsewhere in the header. Newer software will know about it, and older software wouldn't benefit from knowing if it's seeing a version 8 packet or a version 1024, or whatever.
There's many reasons for that, but I don't see how your question is in any way related to what you quoted.
If you go to www.census.gov and look at name statistics for the US, for instance, you will find that the top ten most common last names (Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, Brown, Davis, Miller, Wilson, Moore and Taylor) only account for about 5.6% of the US population.
Only 74 lastnames are in use by more than 0.1% of the US population, and those 74 names only account for about 16% of the total population in total.
The 1990 census includes a further 88700 names spread over the next 74%, and doesn't even list the lastnames for about the last 10% because they are so rare that listing them would involve privacy concerns (the Census Bureau is extremely sensitive about not revealing census information that can identify any specific person)
As another international example, in France more than 900.000 lastnames are in common use, with a significantly smaller population.
That's a good point. I use several different addresses myself as well, in particular to keep most of my work e-mail separate from my personal e-mail, and think that's important. In particular, if I switch jobs, I don't want personal e-mails continue to pour into an address I no longer control, and that likely would be read by my line manager, and similarly I wouldn't want stuff related to my old job to be sent to an e-mail address I'd still control in case there were confidential stuff there and someone leaked it (the chance of an ex-employee with easy access to info being blamed is quite high).
People who buy.com's are mostly corporations or geeks perhaps. Do a search on google for.name sites, and you'll find a much more diverse crows. Our experience so far, though, is that.name appeals much more to non-geeks than to geeks. Perhaps because most geeks seem to have one or more domains already, and are passionate about setting up multiple accounts etc.
With non-geek customers, which make up by far our largest market, that is something we are simply not seeing at all. Most of them don't even know what a domain name is, which is why we are consciously marketing it as an e-mail forwarding address and web forwarding address, and not a domain name - most of our customers don't even care about the web forwarding, they're only interested in getting a nice e-mail address.
Well, unless you actually use the name in carrying out a business, your trademark could be easily taken away from you. So you'd have stiff trademark registration fees, and further costs in ensuring enough activity around the name to ensure your trademark will be enforcable.
I have a great deal of passion for it, as I have myself used my personal name as my e-mail address for the last five years or so. First as vidar@hokstad.com, then as vidar@hokstad.name, and I like it. GNR and later Personal Names was started explicitly because we noticed the huge amount of personal names that had already been registered (this was back in '98), and how hard it had started becoming for people to get a name based address anymore. We started out with a webmail service. 1.5 million people signed up in a year and a half, and our competitors signed up hundreds of thousands as well..name was the logical continuation of that.
In other word, our experience is that the market is there. Our problem has been that the registrars don't know how to reach consumers - they're only used to marketing to businesses.
So we've decided to do it ourselves to show them how to do it.
The point is less than 1% of our customers have even asked about the availability of features like that yet. Most of them wouldn't know what a name server is, or what a domain name is. It wouldn't be cost effective for us to postpone launching the service just in order to get in place features that most of our paying customers couldn't care less about, and wouldn't even understand.
This is something many Slashdot users seem to get wrong: Slashdot users are generally not particularly attractive customers. Sure, there are many people here, but most people here show around for price, complain a lot, are power users that require tons of features normal users aren't interested in, and generally don't like to pay for stuff they can do themselves for free or cheaper.
In other words, while we're happy to take any customer that want our product, and will happily help more advanced users, it would be economic suicide for us to try to cater for Slashdot users instead of people that are less demanding, less price sensitive, more willing to spend and hundreds of times as many.
There are certainly services for which Slashdot users would be the right primary audience, but this is not one of them.
I agree with you that a lot of people won't be interested in revealing their name. However we don't need a large percent of e-mail users to thrive. A percent or two and we'd be set for life;)
As for customer service people, don't worry, we're not hiring someone to sit around and fix the occasional power users issues - the few requests we get are handled by people who are otherwise very busy, including with improving the interface and adding new features.
Don't worry, if things go wrong I'll have no problem finding a new job, but I'm certainly not going to plan anything now - registration numbers are picking up quite quickly.
No, the logical conclusion is not that. I did not say that price would not affect peoples decisions, but that they aren't particularly bothered about the price - intended to tell you that at the price points we have researched so far, there is small to no difference in signup rates. In fact, certain lower pricepoints cause WORSE performance and FEWER sales than our current price.
Our research is based on running campaigns with multiple prices and seeing which generate the best conversion rates. If you think it's wrong, that's up to you, but I doubt you'll be hired to do market research anywhere.
Re:GNR's Claims invalid - RE: [registrars] GNR/Per
on
.NAME at a Crossroads
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· Score: 1
We are listening, and we have tried promotions at lower prices. However, what we are finding is that there is little to no price sensitivity among the users we send to the site - if they want the name, they buy it, regardless of whether they've been offered a promotial price or the normal price. Since our margin is perhaps 5-10 times as high on the normal price, we have absolutely no business justification for lowering it - we're getting a much better return by spending more money on marketing rather than lowering the price, as we actually sell more that way than by lowering the price.
This has been tried before by many other people as well, some of which are actually making a nice profit by reselling third level name based addresses on.com etc. Heck, our company started out as Nameplanet, the webmail service, that got to 1.5 million users of the (free) service before it was sold. It is now a for-pay service and doing quite nicely.
Essentially, your concerns are mostly invalid. First, overlap is much less of a problem than you'd think - people are happy to use variations of their name, such as including a middle name or initial, and the vast majority of people have uncommon firstnames, lastnames or both. Second, spam seems to be less of a problem on small TLD's or small domains, not more, because addresses are equally easy to guess for large ISP's, and large ISPs like AOL are much more interesting targets than a small TLD.
As for user ignorance, we rarely faced that problem with our webmail service. 1.5 million users did not have a problem with it at all. Sure, some people will have problems with it, but hey, we'd be happy with a percent or two of the potential market.
As for length, the longest name I've seen registered was 132 characters long. Obviously that's extreme, but people aren't that concerned about it. With regards to business cards, almost anyone have their name on it. How much more space does "@" instead of space and a ".name" at the end take?
Using "http://www." in front of the web address isn't needed.
You might think we're making mistakes with it, but we did spend year and a half doing a site that provided the research and experience of peoples interest in their name before we started doing.name, and everything we learned from that was incorporated into.name.
Funnily enough, one of the key thing we learned from our research, was that no matter the complaints on here about how.nom/.i/.me/.per would be a better extension, the clear outcome of our market research was that average users far preferred ".name" as the TLD extension - otherwise we would have asked for something else.
Look around at e-mail peoples e-mail addresses. Most ISP's will let you provide your name, but many will then just allocate an address. And in the case where they let you choose, peoples affinity for their name will still lead to tons of easily to guess names.
And ever tried looking at web registration interfaces lately? Most will suggest alternatives if your preferred address has been taken. The patterns for those are easy to find, and it would be trivial to write a program to find the @hotmail.com, for a given list of first names, for instance.
Before doing.name, we ran Nameplanet.com, a webmail service, and we saw spammers use that technique more than once. It's easy, cheap, and beats harvesting addresses any day if you don't give a shit whether people want your spam or not.
As for your comments about your service, our form checks the registry EPP server, and hence reflects the registry system contents live. As for not being able to do anything but setting up web forwarding and e-mail forwarding, that is what most customers want. If you register, and want something else, great, we will be happy to delegate the.name domain of your choice wherever you want, but face it: most users don't know what DNS is and have no clue what they can do with a domain - for them it is a web address, plain and simple.
Regarding marketing, I fully agree with you, "we" didn't market enough. Unfortunately, "we" in this case means all registrars collectively. That's why Personal Names was set up (and cause quite a bit of concern with other registrars), because frankly GNR isn't going to sit still and wait for the registrars to step up and market the product when they haven't done so so far.
How are they plagued by spam? I've had a.name domain name since day one, and my corporate e-mail address has a way higher spam volume than my personal.name address have, despite being on tons of mailing lists and posting to Slashdot regularly.
As for being and indicator of consumer demand, take a look at the advertizing for.name vs. for.com,.info and.biz. Seen many.name ads recently? No, probably not. That seems to be a much larger part of the reason for the level of registrations - the ads we've put out so far seem to work well.
Sure. But how many ordinary internet users would even consider using multiple mailboxes? And how many ordinary internet users does it take to look for an address like that before the various other TLD's don't have their lastname anymore?
Besides, most ordinary internet users don't even have a clue as to what a domain name is - they want the e-mail forwarding. That is what GNR (the registry) has been trying to tell the registrars for ages now (based on extensive, costly marketing research), and the reason Personal Names Ltd. was formed was that the registrars didn't seem to be listening.
You hardly seem like an average user (take that as a compliment), and perhaps our service isn't right for you. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a place - there are registrars out there doing great business at much higher prices for.com, because there are customer niches that couldn't care less about price.
.biz and.info are doing pretty well (closing in on a million registrations),.name is lagging a bit behind, the rest are still very small, but that's to be expected considering their special nature. The closest comparison would perhaps be.int - how often do you visit.int sites? Yet some very large organizations use.int domains as their primary internet presence.
I'm not saying that normal people know their way around the internet. I'm saying that normal people outside the US are more used to non-.com top level domains.
I've got no problems with Americans (well except for that Bush guy:-) - it's not an issue of intelligence or experience or anything of the sort, just that people outside the US tend to get exposed to many more TLD's simply because many large local sites use their local TLD.
That depends on them. Many of them will have nicknames - some will even prefer to use their nicknames. Many will have middle names. Many will be ok with using their initials, in front of or after the first ".", and with and without hyphens. Some will grumpily accept a digit or two. Or they won't register.
Fact is, users with Smith and other common lastnames only make up a small percentage of the potential users anyway (10-20%), and while we'd love to give them a better chance, there's nothing we can do about that.
However, users do show a lot of creativity. And while the primary purpose is for your name, many people use weird nicknames etc.
Look around on the net for various vanity e-mail address services - there are tons of them, so the market is there.
Do you think bbc.co.uk is a proper domain name? If so, then what is different with your firstname.lastname.name? You do get full control over a proper domain, just as you would under.co.uk, and a host of other services.
However, in addition you get an e-mail forwarding on the second level. If you prefer not to use that, then that's your choice - noone are forcing you.
As for being doomed to failure, so far our campaigns show that it's only techies that seem to care at all that it's on the third level, and "ordinary people", that by far outnumber the techie users tend to love it once they see it and understand it. So our challenge is to get it out there, and make it visible, not that people don't like it.
Yes, you get full control over the third level domain, with the ability to create usernames at will and change the nameserver etc. Currently Personal Names Ltd. handle that functionality via e-mail to customer service, as most of our users prefer to just use the web forwarding we provide.
You're right that someone buying john@smith.name doesn't get control over smith.name, but yes, you would own john.smith.name, just as you'd own johnsmith.com.
As for adding additional addresses - you either need to do so under the third level name, or buy another e-mail forwarding. That's how.name is structured in order to give more people a chance at their lastname (try getting a common lastname under.com, for instance)
As for less value, if you can get your firstname@.com, sure, go ahead. For most people, that is not an option, as their lastname was registered years ago. We're giving people another chance at that a reasonable address. If they don't think it's worth it, then that is obviously their right.
So far, however, our research indicate that people aren't particularly bothered about the price - either they want it and the price isn't an object, or they don't.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names Ltd.)
Re:Selling to individuals is good
on
.NAME at a Crossroads
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· Score: 2, Informative
Exactly, and that's the focus of Personal Names: To let you set up a.name without anything except for an existing e-mail address and (if you choose) and existing web page somewhere (whether on it's own server or on a free webhosting service). When you register, you get to enter your forwarding addresses, and you can log in and change that at any point afterwards.
It's meant to be incredibly simple, and it seems to work - we're seeing a good amount of registrations (and btw. <shameless-plug>we have an affiliate program</shameless-plug>)
Slashdot Mirror
So if anyone with the lastname Hokstad out there reads this: There's about a 50/50 chance we're related, and if we are I probably have your name on file ;) (my late father was majorly into genealogy, and catalogued practically all Hokstad's related to us, living or dead).
Using numeric addressing on the internet as well is the last thing I'd want.
Of course there are exceptions, and we saw a good increase in registrations both yesterday and today thanks to this Slashdot article, and some very nice customer service e-mails. And we're happy to help out people who need something slightly more advanced than what we currently offer in our web interface.
However, educating users is extremely expensive - it very rarely makes economic sense to even try, which means it's not often a viable path for a for profit business. It is much more cost effective and profitable to meet your customers at the level they are at and provide what they ask for, and most potential customers aren't anywhere near as technical as Slashdot users.
This is a matter of basic economics. Most people don't understand domain names, don't want to understand domain names and couldn't care less (certainly not enough to bother letting you "educate them"), as long as they get the service they want if they buy from us: an easy to remember e-mail address, and possibly web forwarding.
It's trivial to "fix". The point is that nothing that just understand older versions of IP will need to know which of the never versions it's dealing with, just that it's too new for it to understand. So all you have to do is say that any version that uses X and above in the version field have more version bits stored elsewhere in the header. Newer software will know about it, and older software wouldn't benefit from knowing if it's seeing a version 8 packet or a version 1024, or whatever.
If you go to www.census.gov and look at name statistics for the US, for instance, you will find that the top ten most common last names (Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, Brown, Davis, Miller, Wilson, Moore and Taylor) only account for about 5.6% of the US population.
Only 74 lastnames are in use by more than 0.1% of the US population, and those 74 names only account for about 16% of the total population in total.
The 1990 census includes a further 88700 names spread over the next 74%, and doesn't even list the lastnames for about the last 10% because they are so rare that listing them would involve privacy concerns (the Census Bureau is extremely sensitive about not revealing census information that can identify any specific person)
As another international example, in France more than 900.000 lastnames are in common use, with a significantly smaller population.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names Ltd)
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
With non-geek customers, which make up by far our largest market, that is something we are simply not seeing at all. Most of them don't even know what a domain name is, which is why we are consciously marketing it as an e-mail forwarding address and web forwarding address, and not a domain name - most of our customers don't even care about the web forwarding, they're only interested in getting a nice e-mail address.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
Well, unless you actually use the name in carrying out a business, your trademark could be easily taken away from you. So you'd have stiff trademark registration fees, and further costs in ensuring enough activity around the name to ensure your trademark will be enforcable.
In other word, our experience is that the market is there. Our problem has been that the registrars don't know how to reach consumers - they're only used to marketing to businesses.
So we've decided to do it ourselves to show them how to do it.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
This is something many Slashdot users seem to get wrong: Slashdot users are generally not particularly attractive customers. Sure, there are many people here, but most people here show around for price, complain a lot, are power users that require tons of features normal users aren't interested in, and generally don't like to pay for stuff they can do themselves for free or cheaper.
In other words, while we're happy to take any customer that want our product, and will happily help more advanced users, it would be economic suicide for us to try to cater for Slashdot users instead of people that are less demanding, less price sensitive, more willing to spend and hundreds of times as many.
There are certainly services for which Slashdot users would be the right primary audience, but this is not one of them.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
As for customer service people, don't worry, we're not hiring someone to sit around and fix the occasional power users issues - the few requests we get are handled by people who are otherwise very busy, including with improving the interface and adding new features.
Don't worry, if things go wrong I'll have no problem finding a new job, but I'm certainly not going to plan anything now - registration numbers are picking up quite quickly.
(Disclaimer: I work for personal names)
Our research is based on running campaigns with multiple prices and seeing which generate the best conversion rates. If you think it's wrong, that's up to you, but I doubt you'll be hired to do market research anywhere.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
Essentially, your concerns are mostly invalid. First, overlap is much less of a problem than you'd think - people are happy to use variations of their name, such as including a middle name or initial, and the vast majority of people have uncommon firstnames, lastnames or both. Second, spam seems to be less of a problem on small TLD's or small domains, not more, because addresses are equally easy to guess for large ISP's, and large ISPs like AOL are much more interesting targets than a small TLD.
As for user ignorance, we rarely faced that problem with our webmail service. 1.5 million users did not have a problem with it at all. Sure, some people will have problems with it, but hey, we'd be happy with a percent or two of the potential market.
As for length, the longest name I've seen registered was 132 characters long. Obviously that's extreme, but people aren't that concerned about it. With regards to business cards, almost anyone have their name on it. How much more space does "@" instead of space and a ".name" at the end take?
Using "http://www." in front of the web address isn't needed.
You might think we're making mistakes with it, but we did spend year and a half doing a site that provided the research and experience of peoples interest in their name before we started doing .name, and everything we learned from that was incorporated into .name.
Funnily enough, one of the key thing we learned from our research, was that no matter the complaints on here about how .nom/.i/.me/.per would be a better extension, the clear outcome of our market research was that average users far preferred ".name" as the TLD extension - otherwise we would have asked for something else.
(Disclaimer: I work for personalnames)
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
And ever tried looking at web registration interfaces lately? Most will suggest alternatives if your preferred address has been taken. The patterns for those are easy to find, and it would be trivial to write a program to find the @hotmail.com, for a given list of first names, for instance.
Before doing .name, we ran Nameplanet.com, a webmail service, and we saw spammers use that technique more than once. It's easy, cheap, and beats harvesting addresses any day if you don't give a shit whether people want your spam or not.
As for your comments about your service, our form checks the registry EPP server, and hence reflects the registry system contents live. As for not being able to do anything but setting up web forwarding and e-mail forwarding, that is what most customers want. If you register, and want something else, great, we will be happy to delegate the .name domain of your choice wherever you want, but face it: most users don't know what DNS is and have no clue what they can do with a domain - for them it is a web address, plain and simple.
Regarding marketing, I fully agree with you, "we" didn't market enough. Unfortunately, "we" in this case means all registrars collectively. That's why Personal Names was set up (and cause quite a bit of concern with other registrars), because frankly GNR isn't going to sit still and wait for the registrars to step up and market the product when they haven't done so so far.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
As for being and indicator of consumer demand, take a look at the advertizing for .name vs. for .com, .info and .biz. Seen many .name ads recently? No, probably not. That seems to be a much larger part of the reason for the level of registrations - the ads we've put out so far seem to work well.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
Besides, most ordinary internet users don't even have a clue as to what a domain name is - they want the e-mail forwarding. That is what GNR (the registry) has been trying to tell the registrars for ages now (based on extensive, costly marketing research), and the reason Personal Names Ltd. was formed was that the registrars didn't seem to be listening.
You hardly seem like an average user (take that as a compliment), and perhaps our service isn't right for you. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a place - there are registrars out there doing great business at much higher prices for .com, because there are customer niches that couldn't care less about price.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names Ltd)
Remember .com had about a 15 year head start...
I've got no problems with Americans (well except for that Bush guy :-) - it's not an issue of intelligence or experience or anything of the sort, just that people outside the US tend to get exposed to many more TLD's simply because many large local sites use their local TLD.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names Ltd)
Fact is, users with Smith and other common lastnames only make up a small percentage of the potential users anyway (10-20%), and while we'd love to give them a better chance, there's nothing we can do about that.
However, users do show a lot of creativity. And while the primary purpose is for your name, many people use weird nicknames etc.
Look around on the net for various vanity e-mail address services - there are tons of them, so the market is there.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)
However, in addition you get an e-mail forwarding on the second level. If you prefer not to use that, then that's your choice - noone are forcing you.
As for being doomed to failure, so far our campaigns show that it's only techies that seem to care at all that it's on the third level, and "ordinary people", that by far outnumber the techie users tend to love it once they see it and understand it. So our challenge is to get it out there, and make it visible, not that people don't like it.
(Disclaimer: I work for personal names)
You're right that someone buying john@smith.name doesn't get control over smith.name, but yes, you would own john.smith.name, just as you'd own johnsmith.com.
As for adding additional addresses - you either need to do so under the third level name, or buy another e-mail forwarding. That's how .name is structured in order to give more people a chance at their lastname (try getting a common lastname under .com, for instance)
As for less value, if you can get your firstname@.com, sure, go ahead. For most people, that is not an option, as their lastname was registered years ago. We're giving people another chance at that a reasonable address. If they don't think it's worth it, then that is obviously their right. So far, however, our research indicate that people aren't particularly bothered about the price - either they want it and the price isn't an object, or they don't.
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names Ltd.)
It's meant to be incredibly simple, and it seems to work - we're seeing a good amount of registrations (and btw. <shameless-plug>we have an affiliate program</shameless-plug>)
(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)