Via Snipperoo:
Alongside this message to ‘widgetize everything’ I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that we soon won’t have big static websites (however good you think you’ve got at updating and nurturing your site, you know that really 90% of it is dead in the water), we will have distributed websites that live in a thousand or a million places around the web - and in no place. The idea here is that as your content is broken up and thown out into the four corners of the web, that is where you come to reside. You no longer have a central address, you only exist where you end up. If you are good, you end up in some very powerful places. If you are bad - well, we all know what happens on the web if you are bad.
But it’s slowly dawned on me what the inexorable logic of this approach leads us to - the death of the domain name as the ‘unique’ home address of a company, product or organisational website. And I have form here, because in the mid nineties I semi-singlehandedly invented the domain name industry with NetNames. We recognised the potential power of the domain name as a branding, corporate identifying address before most companies actually had web sites, let alone had realised the need to protect their identity. NetNames still works with many blue chip companies on the ever increasingly complex process of protecting their domain names around the world - the idea that launched that company in 1996.
When I find one of these “domain death” posts not hosted on a domain name I may pay attention, but truth is, this blog post itself is on a domain, the author still branding his own brand and domain name, if you wish to contact him you have to send an email which uses a domain name, and human nature, for thousands of years, has communicated with words and phrases to navigate their way to addresses, merchants.
The reality is the exact opposite, there was no time in history owning your own brand is as important as it is today. We’re living in the information age where every Joe and Jane tries to get a fraction of your attention. How would they do it if not by using words? how would they get you to come back if not by using their brand, and how would you find their brand without an address? Can you imagine, you want to go to Google or Microsoft but you cannot go there, it doesn’t exist. It’s either on your desktop/browser/website in a widget or, you are out of luck. Sounds real? I didn’t think so.
But, if you do believe it and you have excellent .com category defining .com domains, and wish to cash out before the “big fall”, leave a message in this post with your domains and prices. Of course, since the sky is falling, you understand if we may not offer you much.
And since the author is so strongly believes the death of domains is near, I’m here to the rescue. How about 100$ for the domain snipperoo.com and a 100$ more for the domain netnames.com? I thought so.
Wierd. I understand the idea of distributed computing. But for the internet for the most part the system is fundamentally based on domain names. Even if someone sees something about xyz company they are probably still going to go the domain name of xyz before doing business with them.
I think the guy made a point FOR domain name importance. His argument is that static content located on a particular site can be found on the four corners of the internet. No Sh*t. Original content IS hard to find but a unique identifier brings credibility to that unoriginal information. For example if an article is syndicated and published on 100 websites, probability is most people will read the article on the most generic domain name related to that article.
Branding influences what we value, how we talk, what we buy, how we show love (debeers diamonds) for example. It is proven over and over, you can have the greatest widget in the world but without proper marketing, most likely it will fail.
With “distributed websites that live in a thousand or a million places around the web” it will become even more important to have one central destination where customers of these distributed websites can go for customer service, service patches,updates etc.
A domain of some sort will still be the easiest way to identify you, your company and your content.
Cheers!
Though I agree domains are not in danger, I bet every domainer has thought more than once “what if something comes along to make domains obsolete, some better way, etc”. It’s good to come back to this question from time to time, if only just to see there is nothing on the horizon.
Bottom line is, websites are popping up all the time, online content forever changes, and you need a quick way to tell people where to go. A domain does the job just fine, so why try to fix what ain’t broke? Similar analogy is street addresses and phone numbers - some are old, and new ones get created every day.
I fully agree. But for the fun of it, it’s also been said that if you glue two things together that have never been glued together before, at least one schmuk will buy it!
Cheers Sahar