Death of the Domain Name

Ever since I got myself embroiled in the widget business, I've been intermittently speaking on the subject to various audiences. Last year at LIFT I thew caution to the winds and exhorted my audience to blow up their web site and scatter the content to the four winds. I've been pitching this idea casually for almost two years - that the way forward for online presence is to break your content or your message down into the smallest component parts that make sense and allow the ends users to carry them away and recombine them into their own worldview. Then it's up to the content originator to work out how this monetizes. This view came from the inexorable logic of widgetization and nothing I've seen recently has done anything more than reinforce this position.

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.

But in a world where you don't have a central web site, then you don't need to embed your domain name in the minds of everybody who is going to come looking for you. Get that centralising fixation out of your head and all sorts of things can follow. So what replaces the elegant simplicity of the URL? Well, it is already well known that a huge proportion of people are using search engines even when they know the URL of the company they want. They use the search engine as a navigation tool rather than as a search tool. They use it to go to the content. So throw away the domain name and ensure that your content is locatable by way of search tools. You no longer have a Domain Name or a URL, you have a Search Name and a USL (Universal Search Locator).

So where does this lead us? Firstly, it makes search even more powerful, but we will live with that. And secondly, it makes our old friends, the SEO community, more useful than ever. In fact, it formalises what they really do, which is enable the finding of what we want. Of course, not all they do is useful or helpful, but the core proposition is exactly what we will need to learn for ourselves as we "go distributed".

I've known for a long time that this whole widgety thing is much more than creating funky little mini applications to entertain our friends. It leads to a wholesale re-ordering of the whole web. Powerful forces are in play - this is a big big change. I'd suggest you get out there now and reserve your USL.

(With thanks to David Cushman at FasterFuture who blogged my thoughts and prompted me to finally get them written down and out the door)

UPDATE: Funnily enough, within an hour of writing the above I was reading Joi Ito on his term on the board of ICANN where he says this:

I think that it would be nearly impossible to "redesign the DNS" and get people to use it. It would be like trying to redesign a flying airplane. On the other hand, their might be some evolutionary changes that make domain names less relevant.

Comments

[Badger Gravling]

I agree that you'll be able to engage and interact with brands in a huge number of ways without the need to visit their website, or put in their URL...

But I disagree that it removes the need for a central website. For starters, how will all the myriad of widgets be updated without a central feed?

And what about the proportion of the world who still don't use Facebook, Myspace, or other social networking sites?

And finally what about the long tail of search for specific items, rather than a collection of brand widgets? There are very few widgets that would allow me to find a specific story from a site which was published weeks or months ago...

I don't disagree about the importance of widgets etc, but they are a tool of increasingly equal standing to a main website, not a replacement.

[David Cushman]

Nice one Ivan. Raises some really interesting questions about marketing and branding. As we move towards a more semantic web being found by feel rather than keyword may become dominant?
My thoughts on how we don't need websites anymore were posted in feb (as linked from my name) but I certainly hadn't throught through the impact this has on brands.
Very interesting. Look forward to talking with you are Widgety Goodness. best dc

[John Motson]

What a great way to create controversy mate.

All the big domainers are blogging about this post :).

Go linkbait!

John

[Crystal L. Cox]

This makes no sense to me, as a real estate broker I am suppose to tell my clients to just google me and figure out where my listings are?
What about those millions of businesses who are online, have a very good client base, such as writers, artists, and most Realtors who do not have a clue about internet marketing and SEO ? They give their client their card, the client goes to their site, easy - no muss - no fuss.
If their clients just search them they will get thousands of sites to comb through to find the own they really want.
What you are suggesting is a bunch of gobbly goop names that make sense only to the teenagers.

[hugh]

You have got to be the dumbest person on the face of the earth and there a lot of dummies. Just because you missed out they are not going away you will be long gone before domains are.