Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Can .Name be the default for Blogs and Social Media?

I saw Seth Godin Twitter yesterday on domain names. Seth is quoting from a Wired magazine story from 1994 by Josh Quittner . Josh was trying to evangelize the use of a domain name to McDonalds corporation and that companies’ pay much attention to domain name registration back then. (I was surprised that Wired was online back then)

Takeaways from Seth’s Post:

A) “There's only one neighborhood for business online” = .com domain name
B) Have “ a domain that matches what you do” – his example
C) “Don't hesitate to create multiple domains for your efforts” for “Visitor focus”
D) “If you're looking to start an online business, consider finding a great domain and build the business around it, not the other way around.”

Here is an idea I got from Clay Newton’s Blog post. where he registered http://clay.newton.name/ to point to his FaceBook profile. How about making .name the standard for the social media. I thought the idea was cool.

Reasons for people to get a .name

A) Keep business and social media separate
B) The .com is not available and its easy to tell any audience to go to myname.name

Clarification: 10/31/2007 : If you have a great .com domain name there is no reason to switch but if you are starting new or have to seperate identities - Have a easy to remember domain to point to your Linkedin profile.


I was fired up with this idea and registered Shashi.name to point to my blog http://pcadviceus.blogspot.com/ . To take the idea further I asked my bosses here to give me an offer for Bloggers and other users of Social media to register a .name with Network Solutions. They agreed to a nice offer posted below along with my disclaimer.

Seth advices subscribing to the Snapnames newsletter. I suggest you use Keyword Alerts One of the most valuable tools that Network Solutions has. You have the ability to get a customized Keyword Alert based on the terms you want use for a great domain. It will send you a email with a daily list of of expired domains that have your keywords in them.

If you buy into the idea you can buy a .name from any registrar and if you choose to buy it from us here is a special offer http://tinyurl.com/267sjb . $9.99 for a .name domain with free web forwarding (if you need it). you have to add the product "Web Forwarding" - "Forward Your Domain Registration(s) to Another Address" to your cart to get it free

In full disclosure let me tell you I work for Network Solutions - domains are not what I do at work. My views are not necessarily those of Network Solutions.

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