The idea is this: make it easy for customers to assign a domain name to a particular resource. Specifically a customer should be able to buy a domain and then give out subdomains to others or allow them to purchase a subdomain. There should be an API of course, and the whole thing should be really easy to use.

As soon as the article was posted I started receiving tweets from people asking if this might be something interesting for DNSimple to consider. From a technical standpoint it makes sense that DNSimple could do this, likely as a separate service. I started thinking about how it could be implemented and came up with the idea of using NAPTR records as the mechanism for software to query to determine what URL a domain name points to. The second thing would be to include a URL forwarding entry so that if you hit the domain with a browser then you’d be redirected to the resource.

Let’s look at an example:

• Assume I have the domain anthony.com delegated to the name servers for this service.
• If I create an entry for twitter.anthony.com and point it to http://twitter.com/aeden then
• If I `dig twitter.anthonyeden.com naptr` then I would see
• twitter.anthony.com. 3600 IN NAPTR 0 1 "u" "n2u:uri" "!^.*$!http://twitter.com/aeden!" .
• If I browse to twitter.anthony.com then I would be URL forwarded to http://twitter.com/aeden with a 301 Redirect.

The concept is pretty straightforward. I’ve already created a simple prototype, but before I go any further I wanted to find out if there are other people interested in a service like this. Would you be willing to share revenue on sales of subdomains? Would you be willing and interested in integrating NAPTR DNS lookups in your software as a way to resolve a domain name to a URL?

Edit: There seems to be some question as to whether or not NAPTR records are really needed. Here’s why I think they are: A 301 redirect will work, however this means that a redirector server has to be hosted by the service that is providing the delegation, in addition to name servers. NAPTR, with adoption by clients (like browsers) means that the DNS record alone could provide all the details that client needs to make its next move. I think that this is a much more scalable long-term solution and thus I would propose that both a URL forwarding system and NAPTR records are useful for a redirect service.

I’ll also be stopping at Startup Riot in Orlando as I’ve heard great things about it and I always love to see what other entrepreneurs are working on.

Without further ado, here’s my travel schedule:

Feb 3: Montpellier -> Paris -> Orlando
Feb 4&5: MagicRubyConf @ Disney World
Feb 6&7: Melbourne, FL
Feb 8: Miami, FL
Feb 9: LessEverything, Jacksonville, FL
Feb 10: NC
Feb 11-14: InfoEther, Reston, VA
Feb 15: Relevance, Durham, NC
Feb 16: Startup Riot, Atlanta, GA
Feb 17-18: Hashrocket, Jacksonville, FL
Feb 21: Envy Labs, Orlando, FL
Feb 22-24: Parallels Summit, Orlando, FL
Feb 24: Orlando -> Paris -> Montpellier

In case it’s not obvious, I’m not a winter sort of person, so if the weather craps out then I probably won’t make it any further north than…well, wherever it starts getting icy.

And here is how it might be used:

Give it a try using the following:

ruby retryable_test.rb

What do you think? How can this be improved?

Diaspora wants to be “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.” A noble goal, I suppose, however what I’ve come to realize is that this doesn’t really matter to me. What really matters to me is: 1.) reinforcing my existing relationships with family and friends (for both business and non-business situations) and 2.) find people that I would like to be friends with by virtue of shared interests. How do I reinforce these relationships? Through communication. When does communication occur? Two examples include 1.) on special dates, for example on a family member’s birthday or the launch of a friend’s business and 2.) as part of open discussions where I can contribute and add value through useful information, humor or commiseration. Indeed communication can even occur at random times “just because”. The point is that there are various times where communication can occur due to time, context and/or both.

Now that I’ve expressed what I want, it’s time to take a look at what is already available – I don’t live in a fantasy world where I can randomly rebuild my entire social network – the network already is, I just want to better harness it.

Facebook

Of all of the places where I have a network, Facebook is probably the closest in vision to what I want, but it falls down in a few significant areas. First of all, my network on Facebook consists mostly of former high school friends. While I don’t mind occasionally getting back in touch with some of them, they do not represent my network that matters most to me (which consists of my family and the friends I’ve made since leaving college, most of whom are on Twitter). The other thing that bothers me about Facebook is the insistance on “real-time” interactions. I find little value out of the stream of updates from my Facebook friends, largely due to the fact that most of them are not people I expect to communicate with on a daily basis. Another problem I have with Facebook is their “platform” nature. I have two platforms that matter to me: OS X (and iOS I suppose) and the web. I really don’t want Facebook to deliver apps, I never have – I want Facebook to deliver the stories from my friends and family that will help me stay in touch. In addition to these two biggies I have several other smaller issues with Facebook, such as their less-than-stellar API and cluttered interface, but I could get past those if Facebook delivered what I really needed.

Twitter

I use Twitter a lot more than I use Facebook which I think is largely due to the fact that the people I follow on Twitter are closer to my actual network, with a few significant exceptions. Where Twitter shines is the ease of getting messages in and out. If all I wanted was a real-time feed of what my friend’s are doing and thinking and writing about then I could pretty much just use Twitter and be done with it, and for some time now this is mostly what I’ve done (and for that matter may end up being what I continue doing). All is not double rainbows though. First Twitter is fairly timezone sensitive – I miss a lot of really interesting stuff because I am in a timezone that is almost inverted from many of my friends and family. Often Twitter is like a novel where I only catch some parts of the story – I can usually fill in the rest but I am still missing a lot of the story. The other issue I have with Twitter is that there is very little context since everything is pretty much a real-time feed from the people I follow. I believe that Twitter lists were supposed to add some context, and perhaps searching does as well, but I feel like I have to jump through hoops to view Twitter in different contexts. Facebook does not do any better at this, but since I use it so little I don’t feel the pain the same way. Context is king and right now I think no social network that I use does this well.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn does one thing very well: when I think about my business network I think LinkedIn. That’s a big deal. I have not yet connected to my entire business network on LinkedIn, but I have connected with a significant portion of it. LinkedIn is not very sticky for me, but I still get significant value out of it on occasion, so I’m ok with that (and I hope they are as well). According to their blog, they’ve been in the black since 2007, so hopefully they’ll be able to continue on the path that they’re on and if they do they’ll likely remain a part of my various networks.

Gmail and Google

If I were to agree certain media outlets, Google hasn’t yet figured out how to be an active part of my social network. Naturally I disagree – Google is a significant part of my social network, just through more traditional channels like email. My Gmail contacts represent most if not all of my active social network, both friends and family. My Gmail contacts also has a lot of junk in it, but the real network is there, buried in the chaff. Google has also become part of my instant communication network through GTalk. Unlike Facebook’s chat, GTalk is something I actually use all the time. I could also see a time in the future where Google Voice becomes part of my toolset for communicating with my network, especially as these three channels, email, IM and voice, come together. Given how good Google is at indexing things they also happen to be the goto source for non real-time information about my network.

So why does the media get down on Google when it comes to Social Networking? I think it’s largely because it’s implicit – Google does it but it isn’t “the feature”, rather it is just part of all of their applications now. Had Buzz come out earlier Google could have very well been what Twitter is for me now, but it didn’t and it hasn’t, so I can’t write off everything and just use Google (I’m not sure I would even want to, but it’s almost possible so it’s worth at least thinking about).

Everything Else

Even with those “big” players I still end up with parts of my social network scattered all over the place. In addition to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google I also have chunks of my network on Skype, Geni, Tripit, Gowalla and even in my Apple Address Book. I use Skype on a daily basis for communicating with friends and family. I use Geni for keeping up-to-date on more distant family members. I have a tiny little network on TripIt for seeing who is travelling where and I have a slightly larger network on Gowalla to see who is doing what. When I used my phone my Apple Address Book was essential, although this is less so now that I’m in Europe and haven’t activated my phone here. The bottom line is that my network and my channels of communication are scattered across multiple services: that’s reality.

Back to the Point

As I mentioned at the start of this post, what really matters to me is: 1.) reinforcing my existing relationships with family and friends (for both business and non-business situations) and 2.) find people that I would like to be friends with by virtue of shared interests. No one service does this for me, rather it is the combination of numerous services that does it. The other key point is that my network already exists, I don’t want nor can I rebuild it all in a single environment, distributed or not. Ultimately that means Diaspora is probably not for me.

So what now? I have some ideas which I may or may not put in another post. For the moment I’ll continue using Twitter as my main mode of “random” communication, I’ll continue to use the tools I have from Google for most of my directed communication and I’ll continue failing at staying in touch with everyone I want to stay in touch with as often as I’d like until I find a better way to do it.

If you have thoughts or comments on what you want from social networking, please do feel free to comment here.

1.) Follow the instructions here (Rob Sanheim, FTW): http://robsanheim.com/2007/12/11/creating-a-static-loopback-address-to-use-in-vmware/

2.) If you provide a different interface depending on the requested host name, then Edit C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to point 10.0.0.100 (or whatever IP address you selected in step 1 to a hostname (for example local.mysite.com).

That’s pretty much it. I noticed that I had to restart IE for it to recognize the new hosts file changes, but otherwise it works like a charm.