Sroys

What’s in a brand name? A name that means ONLY YOU - that is what your goal should be when you try to build a brand name for your business or website. While there is a MASSIVE market for generic domain name reselling where people buy generic names in hope that someone will want it one day and they’ll earn million but I fail to understand why people don’t realize that while some generic names can help you build a successful business around it - not all generic names work. Search.com is not the biggest search engine - books.com is not selling the most number of books online.

What matters is your ability to understand the pschology associated with every generic name - generic names I believe only work when there is a little bit of desperation involved in what the user is looking for and then it depends on the website owner’s ability to cater to that need. One fine example is NAUKRI.com - the word means JOB in Hindi - the primary language of India. NAUKRI.com quickly became the number one job site in India cause the name associate to a desperate need and the website caters to that need well.

So while I would love to use generic terms - I would only use it depending on what I am trying to offer to the users. One of the main reasons I believe this huge domain reseller market exists is for companies to want an edge over other websites in any industry - while this method has an advantage it will only work with a world class product if you are trying to make your website or business synonymous to something generic - this often is a major expectation from users. If the users gets that world class product - it’s a HIT - if it’s mediocere - it fails miserably - as it would not get the kind of response it’s meant to get comparing it to the amount of investment that would go into building the product - so although it may be used it may not become the world leader for that industry.

My opinion about this is that you should always try to mix things when you are a small developer and you are trying to build a brand - mixing the generic and the brandability often makes it easier. The name needs to be catchy and should have a natural flow to the name. So a mix of a generic word - something very important in your industry plus something to make it catchy. Or if you are extremely sure that your product is world class you could name it higibib and it would work. What I am trying to say is while having a keyword in your domain name is a good move it’s not the most important by any chance. Brands are built by products and not the other way around - that’s all you need to remember.

TELL THEM TO STOP! ICANN has introduced a new top level domain - .TEL - where companies can have a single page website containing their telephone contact numbers - no images, no logo - nothing.

Well this is outright silly - well maybe actually not - it’ll make ICANN a hell lot of money as all major companies would HAVE TO BUY their domain and put up their page of telephone numbers. It’s really odd that this sort of top level domains are being introduced - how about something more useful like .tech or .software or .app or .consultant or .browse - anything but this.

You know what’s coming next - .office - where you can one page with your office address. Then it’ll be .born to display your birthday to the world. How exactly do they decide what to release next in terms of top level domains?

As Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch puts it “ICANN is notorious for approving just about any new project as long as they get their fees (ICANN was in favor of creating a special porn domain name until the U.S. Senate suggested it might be a bad idea)”

TechCrunch has linked itself with FaceBook - this is a landmark for FaceBook as now many websites will connect to it and the amount of information they will have will probably surpass Google in a few years. This information is of course more relevant and a much better measure to rank websites with as this information is more “Human” and not something like “page back links” which Google uses as a primary method to rank websites.

This may soon make Facebook a very valuable information source.

Image courtesy: Tech Crunch

Britney spears has done it again - according to Yahoo Britney spears was the most searched term on their search engine. This was followed by WWE and barrack obama in 2nd and 3rd place. This shows that entertainment and news are the two big industries on the Internet.

No wonder the success of services like YouTube which provides videos and is possibly the most well known source of such entertainment online.

This also shows for developer this industry would be the most lucrative - with efforts being made to make the Internet reach your living room where until now the TV has ruled - this will soon be history with many companies coming in to reach you where you spends the most hours looking for entertainment. Although lucrative this industry is one of the most difficult to cater to - in terms of original content development - that is where DIGG has done such a great job in building a platform where people can look for the most important news stories - however there system too has flaws and many people are gaming the system to push their own news stories to the top.

So should we small start ups go ahead and try to build something for the entertainment business. I think that would not be a good idea unless you have a lot of funding - innovation in terms of new web businesses are something which can only be handled f you have a lot of funds.

Entertainment news is in that way only accessible to large companies for development. For small developers the focus should probably be on technology which makes the large developers more accessible - which is probably true in most industries - for example in social networking we see many facebook application developers thrive. Perhaps a platform will come soon where we will be able to cater to the entertainment audience by building small applications which would run on the ITV sitting in your living room.

It’s very possible if they are bright enough to see the possiblity with FaceBook Connect. This is a very bold new step and could very well be their best decision so far. The blog says:

Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

Imagine getting updates from friends about which movie review the commented on - which product they bought - which website they think are their favorites. Imagine facebook connecting with services like disqus - imagine knowing what they are saying on blogs. Now isn’t this priceless information - facebook will know which websites are the authority in each and every single industry - which blogs have the most comments on a particullar subject. Surely this information is way better ranking factors.

But all this will happen when Facebook creates and makes it easy for people to integrate their website into a social network. If anyone with a facebook login is allowed to login into my forum and allowed to access information and place comments - and if facebook indexes these pages and know exactly who commented on the page and who their friends are and who their friends friends are - and where they are located. The amount of information and what can be done with it is limitless.


One of the key ways Google climbed to the top was by rewarding publishers through their adsense program - I believe many will agree that without Google and adsense the Internet would’ve been a different place. The amount of information these publishers and their users threw at Google - through toolbars and analytics is just immense - this intelligence has been used by Google very well - and if FaceBook can do the same - or better - since their information can be even more valuable and more “Human” - imagine what they can do.

But will FaceBook have the foresight to see who they need on their side to make this possible - that is the big question. If they can make it easy for publishers [even small fry publishers like me] using the popular open source or paid software packages like wordpress, vbulletin, phpbb to connect with FaceBook and exchange information and members - FaceBook - with proper programming - can become an immense information source.

Imagine me going to FaceBook Search and searching for “human resource management” and learning that john who is friend of joe - who is my friend - uses and has commented on an article on one of the websites - perhaps there can be a way where you can see the degree of separation from the users who have used sites dealing in “human resource management” - imagine having a way to connect with these people who seem to have gone through the same issues I am facing. Or maybe I am thinking about buying a digital camera - and my FaceBook Search shows me which websites my friends and my friend’s friends visited - who said what - maybe even which camera they bought finally.

I just hope that FaceBook will take it up and do this - it’s their chance to become the next Google.