Re: Internet Keywords, RealNames

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Fri 23 Jun 2000 00:29:09 -0600

TO WHICH MARLENA SCHWARZ <Marlena_at_Sharpe-Partners.com> RESPONDED:
> The flipside (and the problem in my opinion) is if you
> have a widely recognized name like Coke or Pepsi, you
> don't need a Realname. You already have the best "Real
> Name" there is! One would have to be rather slow to
> need help finding coke.com or pepsi.com.

TO WHICH JOHN GASKILL <gm_at_info-central-usa.com> WROTE:
> Marlena hits the nail on the head here.
>
> Aside from a few lucky "real name" customers,
> the average Joe is unlikely to get a name that
> helps his/her cause.
>
> And I don't know about the rest of you, but
> I have never visited RealNames site to look
> up anything.

I will say this about the RealNames system. They are
not trying to compete directly with the search
engines. They are now supplementing the search
services on several sites, but there is another facet
to their business.

They supply a program or browser plug-in (I don't
recall which) that people can download for free and
use to visit Web sites. The RealNames user interface
allows people to type in phrases without the "http://"
and hyphens, periods, coms, orgs, nets, whatever to
get to the Web sites which have Real Names.

To be honest, if you type "xenite.org" into today's
browsers, you'll get to my domain just fine as they'll
insert the "http://" automatically. So it would be a
waste of time to tell people to type in "Science
fiction and fantasy xenite.org".

This is the real problem with RealNames. It's really
not useful to sites with short domain names. You have
to teach people to remember the Real Name anyway, so
why not the domain name? Barnes and Noble used the
service to brand categories of their book service. I
suppose that was more useful than advertising specific
URLs with slashes, tildes, per cents, and other
strange characters.

What would be universally useful to surfers and
Webmasters would be a tool whereby the surfers can
create their own names for Web sites and just click on
those. Of course, we already have that tool in
Netscape's Bookmarks and Internet Explorer's
Favorites.

I suspect the RealNames service will become most useful
for sites which have lengthy URLs for sub-pages that
they want to brand in some fashion. And it may
eventually become a prestige service.

Speaking of branding, I sent the following URL in the
other day as part of a lengthy message. I haven't
seen the message come back so I guess it wasn't
accepted for inappropriate content. Here's a URL to an
article in Business 2.0's Web site about "Branding".

http://www.business2.com/content/channels/marketing/2000/06/13/12868

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Received on Fri Jun 23 2000 - 01:29:09 CDT