Wednesday January 25
th’s Domainfest keynote was presented by
John Battelle CEO of
Federated Media.
John chronicled his business career in traditional media, and how it led to his current position.
While his career is basically a timeline of the booms and busts of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 (a term I loathe) his major point was that the web, what users expect, and what you can do, has changed.
This point has been driven home to me again and again at the conference, and honestly, why I was encouraged to attend.
Many of the speakers, presenters and the live domain auction itself, focused on topics like increasing pay per click revenues by doing things like adding pictures. That this gambit is short term at best was illustrated when John showed a screenshot of the site be.com. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a reason why you’d want to navigate to this site – there really is nothing on the landing page that is in any way related to the two top uses of the word “be” (at least according to Google), as the stock ticker symbol for BearingPoint or the country Belgium (or for that matter, one of my fraternity brothers band “be”). Rather, there are the standard links that every site seeking to capture “type in” traffic includes: Dating, Cars, Electronics, etc. etc. Now while I’m sure that the owner of be.com makes a decent living, and Hitfarm, the company that provides the landing pages is in fact optimizing the landing page to reflect traffic patterns, I can’t help but think that something’s missing. The “parked pages” concept seems to be a concept that does not reflect current use of the Internet, or those uses that are right around the corner.
I wonder how difficult it would be for domain owners to utilize new technologies to truly optimize their sites. While I fully understand the power of Big IP, I wonder how difficult it would be to create a series of template sites that capitalize on the current use of the domain name? If you can’t figure that out, how about a wiki? People who come to the domain could tell you what they came there for. What about some “Office 2.0” tools you get for free that enhance the value of the page to the users? Features like this might increase the value of the domain itself, but also remove some of the legal issues surrounding domaining, that make life difficult for domainers.
Sticking with what works is a decent business philosophy, but keeping your eyes open, and creating a nimble organization is, I’d say, a crucial component to success.
Lest you think I’m picking on domainers, let me make one thing clear: I think it’s worse in the hosting world. For crying out loud, how much bandwidth, disk space, and free domains can the industry give out before hosting is totally free? For hosts, business is moving in the same direction as domains. The cost of including new tools has significantly declined, and your ability to include them with minimal engineering has increased. Look, for example, at Hostway. Hostway’s business has expanded from shared, and now includes domain parking services. It’s really only a matter of time before the services provided to parked pages is expanded to include creating sites of more apparent value.
I think, sometimes, we need to venture out of our comfort zones to see what else might be out there.
All I know is I have apps that are files and a mysql database up on my hosting instance (Like Mantis) and then I have apps like QuickBooks and Jira sitting on my laptop or in my office LAN and they scare the hell out of me because of the risk of data loss.
My hosting instance is a more secure place for me to have things than on my LAN. If they can keep that and form a consortium for a pluggable interface for applications to write to then we're talking web 3.0! or would it be 2.1 David?
;-P