Russell Beattie Notebook ? RealNames Next

Russell Beattie Notebook ? RealNames Next

It's strange how I was thinking of the same thing this morning - when I saw my wife keying in full url's like www.webmd.com. And I was reminded of the Realnames concept from a few years back too. That made me wonder as to why this never took off.

But then I thought some more and I noticed my own usage of the web browser - strangely I observed that in most cases I was just putting in the descriptive word for a website or company that I wanted to visit and the google address bar search combined with the setting to take me to the most appropriate result did the rest (you can do the same by configuring your browser address field to use Yahoo search or MSN search and it will take you to the most appropriate result). Now granted that sometimes it doesn't take you to the right website, however the same issues would be there with Realnames also. As it is, in USA there are companies with same names registered in different states. How will you decide who gets to register the name? What about all the other companies with the same name? How about the international stuff - when the web started, US was way ahead and everyone accepted that US based ICANN will administed the .com domain. How are you going to get every country in the world to accept such a scheme at this time - when the growth of internet is much faster in other countries.

My suggestion is that you let Google and other search providers to worry about taking you to the best match - no need to reinvent the wheel.