bradKELLETT

Obviously, despite all the talk of long tails, quitting blogging, and all the other issues flying around lately, there are a hell of a lot of perks to being an A-List blogger, or indeed an A-List anything. One huge perk of not being an A-List blogger occurred to me the other day, however – being able to actually use all these cool new services how they were intended.

Take services like Twitter or Friendfeed, for example. Scoble and Calacanis et al. have these huge following/follower counts, and while I know there are a certain number of positives to this, these top users don’t ever get to use these services for what they are intended to do. These guys don’t actually use Twitter for sending out status updates to friends, and I doubt they ever make any lasting friendships out of them.

While Brightkite is floundering a little of late, it is another perfect example of this A-List effect. Could you imagine Scoble and his 30,000-odd followers actually using Brightkite for seeing where friends are and meeting up locally? No, instead their phone/web interface would be flooded with updates that they more than likely don’t care about.

Having these crazy number of relationships on these services basically turn them into great big science experiments. While this has its use, I’m happy sticking to using them for their original puporse.

But I guess that is the true beauty of these things – you can use them however it makes you happy.

Inspired by an interesting blog post from Robert Scoble (yes, he does have them every now and then), I purchased the domain ObsoleteSkills.com and set up a wiki for people to document all those skills that the latest technology really makes obsolete. So far, skills that have been added to the wiki include things like adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV, dialing a rotary phone, and churning butter of all things. That is all great, and I hope that people enjoy it, but to register the domain I had to pay over four times more than I usually do, and in the process I had my eyes opened to a very dodgy system from Network Solutions.

I am coming into this on the tail end, as apparently Network Solutions had been called out on this previously, but the company undertakes a poor practice when a user searches for a domain: the company effectively registers it, and enters it with the status ‘clientHold,’ even if the user doesn’t actually register it. This DNS status usually means that there is a legal issue involving the registrant or a service on the domain, and it causes the domain to still be registered but not resolve to a server. The end result is that anyone wishing to register the domain, not just the person that originally searched for it, must go through Network Solutions to do it, and they can charge whatever they see fit.

This is exactly what happened with ObsoleteSkills.com. Someone, presumably also having seen Scoble’s post, would have searched for the domain using Network Solutions, but didn’t go through with the registration. When I went to register the domain with my normal registrar, it said it was taken, but I was able to register the domain through Network Solutions, albeit at a severe premium.

All this has been detailed quite well by Todd McKinney in his ‘Evil Still Lurks‘ post and a follow-up post.