Last November, Bill Lederer, president and founder of Art.com paid $450,000 for the rights to the URL, www.art.com. As the name suggests, the website deals in art: prints, matting and framing, and so forth. As he explained the lofty price he paid for the name,
"The name is everything." On the Web the name game can get pretty tricky. For instance if one wanted to go the website of Simon Properties, America's largest mall owner and developer, you would think that you could go to www.simonproperties.com and, presto, be there. Wrong! It seems that someone has already registered that name. You would have to go to www.simon.com to get to the right Website. It is possible that Simon Properties owns the first URL name. Or it could be the result of a endeavor known as cyber-squatting: the business of buying up desirable names with the hope of turning that $70 registration fee into thousands of dollars by reselling that domain name to a "needy" company.
That practice aside, many URLs are difficult to master or understand. Too long or unintelligible. It makes the online branding issue a little more difficult. For instance, for a reader to visit our website, he would have to type into his browsers address line: www.where-its-at.com. The present system cannot accept our company name, "where it’s @".
One company, two-year old, San Carlos, CA-based, Centraal Corporation, may have an answer: RealNames. The RealNames System would allow Web users to simply type in a real name, such as "where it’s @" and be able to go directly to that Web page.
To be technical about it, the system is based on distributed XML technology. A RealName is an object with properties. It creates an "intelligent service". XML allows additional attributes or "knowledge" about a Web page to be attached to an object such as a RealName.
In more plain English here's how it works: Centraal allows companies, organizations or individual website owners to subscribe to a RealName. The subscription is $100 for a one-year subscription. The subscriptions are based not on a first come basis but on an adjudication process that determines rights to that name, corresponding content on the Website, and so forth. The RealName cannot be a generic name such as "cars" or "pets" or a trade name that belongs to someone else but must have some specificity to the subscriber. Once that name is approved, Web users might go to their favorite search engine and simply type in the RealName and be directed to the appropriate website. Centraal has an agreement with search companies such as Alta Vista, Inktomi, Infoseek Express, LookSmart, NeoPlanet, and others to have their search sites be RealName enabled. In our case, one can go to www.altavista.com and type in "where it’s @", hit "search" and have our RealName come up as the top selection. The system is not limited to any letters, numbers or languages.
The company is working to have the new generations of browsers be RealName enabled. The new Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 is capable of being configured to use RealNames. Once the RealName option is selected, one does not have to type in the URL but simply type in the RealName. Again, instead of typing in the address line our lengthy URL, one can type in "where it’s @" and be taken directly to our home page.
A large number of major corporations have already signed on. Honda for instance has subscribed to a slew of names. With an enabled IE 5.0, to find out about the Honda Accord, one need simply type in Honda Accord and be taken directly to that page. E-tailers are getting onboard. Companies such as barnesandnoble.com and OfficeDepot.com have found that the system is delivering more customers to their websites.
Centraal recently announced a new program called My RealName, a personalized Web addressing service. Through alliances with the community sites such as Geocities, Tripod, and Xoom.com, Centraal is giving away free My RealNames for personal, individual use. The program is sure to raise awareness of the system and make its use more efficient.