Who killed RealNames? Don't blame Microsoft

The now-defunct RealNames was the good idea in question, as well as the subject of a recent column by my colleague David Coursey.

THE COMPANY OFFERED a Web navigation aid using a keyword-to-URL translation in the address bar of Internet Explorer. "To be useful, RealNames had to be consistent and, to do that, it had to be nearly ubiquitous--nearly every logical keyword had to produce a useful result. But instead, I've run across RealNames-enabled sites so infrequently lately, I wasn't really sure the company was still in business," Coursey wrote.

Many of you pointed out a variety of problems with RealNames's strategy: confusing branding, the troublesome differences when typing in names and addresses, and competition from the growing use of search engines.

"Most people just never knew about RealNames," Gary Deroy recalled. "I'd seen it somewhere but never bothered to find out what it was, just thinking it was some spin-off of [RealNetworks's] RealPlayer. This is the primary reason why it failed."

"Perhaps RealNames had difficulties with Microsoft, but it seems that RealNames's bigger problem was that Google ate away the basic value of RealNames's ability to match a keyword with a URL," Topher Wren added. "If I don't know a company's URL, Google is a click away, and it matches keywords to URLs with amazing effectiveness. Google also offers a service equivalent to RealNames through its sale of sponsored links. Bye-bye, RealNames."

"The biggest issue is the proprietary nature of RealNames. The whole intention of the Net is to be open and standardized, yet here was a company basing their entire future on Microsoft supporting their proprietary links within Internet Explorer," Fred Fredrickson observed. "A far better model would have been to have any browser use their tags by publishing an interface specification for native support and also publishing plug-ins for add-on support."

Still, Fredrickson, like many of you, found problems with the tags. "Personally, I find the idea of smart tags very disruptive," he continued. "There would also be a serious problem with squatters picking up popular tags, as there is no regulated body to control the sale and issue of tags. Someone could do my business great harm by buying the RealNames tag of my business and pointing it to a porn site."

"Instead of [RealNames CEO] Keith Teare blaming Microsoft, maybe he should blame his clients," Richard Childs wrote. "I received the impression that companies didn't renew their RealNames keywords--a decision probably based on reviewing the server logs and seeing that people weren't coming in with a keyword. I know if I was paying yearly for a service and the logs didn't show people using it, I wouldn't renew."

Granville Gough directed fellow readers to an alternative, CommonName. "It's free, works well, and provides a fast, selective list of site links from almost any word/topic/name you enter."

MANY OF YOU dissed the whole idea of such name translation, writing that there's no problem adding "www" and ".com" to the beginning or end of a name. Several of you argued that such thinking may hold true for Web users in the United States, but not for international surfers. And besides, the list of domains nowadays extends far beyond the familiar dot-com.

In addition, a long message from Karen Liu revealed a different need for keyword-to-URL translation. She works for the Beijing-based Inter China Network Software Technology Development Co., a competitor of RealNames. According to Liu, the company serves more than 25 million keyword queries a day.

"The biggest market potential for keyword service is in Asia, because there are strong navigation challenges faced by billions of people using non-Roman alphabet languages," Liu wrote, detailing the competitive market for such services in the region.

Liu's site "provides a different keyword service, which is to respect real-world identities and to only provide a linking service between a real identity and its corresponding URL. Doing so involves a rigorous verification process," Liu described. "We are not providing a naming layer, rather we provide a directory-like linking service. We believe that names and identities are governed by real-world IP and business registration rules, and keyword technology should be used to facilitate the seamless integration of online and real-world identities."

WHEN IT COMES to common tasks--walking, reading, or typing on the keyboard--we can easily forget the differences between people. Millions of English speakers have difficulty entering long strings of data via the keyboard, including URLs. And from Karen Liu, we see that it's really billions.

So what some of you described as "laziness" can be an essential service for others. Maybe this good idea really wasn't so "stupid," after all.

David Morgenstern, past editor of eMediaweekly and MacWEEK, is a freelance editor and branding consultant based in San Francisco.

Why do you think RealNames went out of business? Is Microsoft really to blame? TalkBack to me below.