No One Uses RealNames
from the do-we-care dept
I had a friend who had considered taking a job with RealNames a little while back and I asked him if he’d ever actually used it, and tried to use a “real name” to get to a web page. His answer was of course not. It seems he’s not alone. Turns out almost no one actually uses it. But, they’re not worried. It still strikes me that this is a nice to have, but not a business. This is something that should just be there.
Comments on “No One Uses RealNames”
Good Reasons To Avoid It
I installed the RealNames add-on for about 5 minutes before I realized that every single thing I typed into the Address line, well-formed URL or not, was passed to their server. A minor drawback is that a round trip to their server slows things down, but the major drawback is the potential invasion of privacy. This is as bad as having a doubleclick.net cookie on every single page you decide to visit by typing and, at the time, I didn’t see any way to opt out of this tracking.