Solid Pod Usernames related to Keyword advertising and other business opportunities

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While there are many developers working on Solid, I thought that this would be a great time to talk about using Solid WebId usernames in various ways to promote products, services, and general information. Your WebId username on solid.community or inrupt.net can be valuable in the future as some people will begin to do organic searches under subjects by simply typing in what they are looking for followed by .solid.community or .inrupt.net. For instance, consider your looking to purchase insurance; one could simply fetch https://insurance.solid.community and or inrupt.net and possibly find good deals on home, auto and/or life insurance or business insurance.

I know that there are many on the forum that would say using Solid Pods to advertise products and services may not be welcome but, to deny its application and future use would probably alienate millions of users who want to sell products and services to other Solid members.

I would like to start this topic to see if there are others that agree that, using Solid Pod usernames to sell products and services related thereto by creating affiliate accounts and selling products is needed to bring on other commercial enterprises.

Consider the .com industry, Insurance.com sold for $35.6 million US Dollars (https://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-domain-names-of-all-time-2016-4#other-expensive-domain-names-not-listed-by-dnjournal-either-because-they-were-sold-prior-to-2003-or-other-assets-were-sold-with-the-domains-38) . How much will insurance.solid.community or insurance.inrupt.net be worth in 5 years?

I understand that this may be a sensitive conversation for some but, I would like to get some feedback on the subject. Please feel free to chime in on the conversation.

I know that I am not far off on this subject because, it appears that most of the user accounts on both Inrupt.net and solid.community appear to be search related keywords. This tends to indicate a motive or intent to exploit the username for the purposes of advertising a product or service.

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I donā€™t have much knowledge about this topic, but Iā€™ll add my two cents here:

An aim of Solid is to give everyone the ability to choose where their data is stored. One can choose if it is stored on xyz.inrupt.net, xyz.solid.community or even host it themselves. So anyone with a bit know-how on this can create their own pod or provide pods to other people. While I am pretty sure, that there will be some common providers, I believe it will be more distributed than it is with .com, .net and co (i.e. there will be hundreds of "inrupt.net"s who provide pods; there arenā€™t that many popular .comā€™s and .netā€™s on the other side).

If this is the case, and the hosting of solid pods is spread across many domains, ā€œinsurance.inrupt.netā€ wouldnā€™t be that worthy because thereā€™s also ā€œinsurance.one-of-hundreds-providers.netā€ too which has the same worth (depending on how common the provider is).

And as a side note, I personally never enter ā€œinsurance.comā€ directly, I always go through the filter of a search engine. So I guess SEO are important for this (but as Iā€™ve said, itā€™s not a topic I know much about)

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There can only be one insurance .solid .community, and only one ā€˜mobileā€™, or photography on solid.community.

Once they have gone they have gone, so only one individual insurance firm, mobile phone company or photographers can have that name. The people concerned could be anywhere in the (English speaking) world, so there would be little point. Even if it was listed top in Google, you still wouldnā€™t know where it was and few people looking for a local company would click on the link. In short the single solid .community link would not be worth anything like the same as the similar .com link

Organizations currently holding the .com addresses would of course host a Solid POD server alongside their existing website servers so they would be providing the following Web UserIDā€™s for all their store managers:

brighton.axainsurance .com
bristol.axainsurance .com
bournemouth.axainsurance .com

If they are already using those sub-domains, they will simply make things one step longer:

pod.brighton.axainsurance .com

It will these company Solid Web PODā€™s that will invariably appear at the top of Google searches.

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My thoughts are that solid users on solid.community would prefer to give the business to their local solid.community members, instead of another pod provider. If someone was selling a product or service that I could use, and it was from someone with a solid.community address, I would purchase from them instead of purchasing elsewhere.

One is not limited to hosting only one insurance company on your pod, or index.html page but, links to insurance companies in your local area by zip code for example.

If it were not for the thousands of usernames already taken that conform to seo and search related products, sales and services, I would be able to see your point. Thank you for your input.

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@adventure I understand the point of solid usernames for advertising, maybe I have Solid wrong, but I thought my Solid pod is for my apps that hold my own data, Iā€™m not sure where insurance.solid would fit in to my apps and my data?

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Thank you for your response. Your solid pod is for whatever you want it to be. It can be a place where you store your data, you can host your website on your index.html page, or create a ā€œLunch Break APPā€. Solid Pods are meant to be searchable however, as you well know, you can restrict the data that you want to remain private as well. What if someone in the Solid Community wanted to lookup what other solid users are doing with there pods and happen to type in random keywords to see whats on solid like, https://photography.solid.community, or say someone wanted to look up there favorite guitarist like Yngwie Malmsteen? You can look up https://yngwiemalmsteen.solid.community or https://yngwiemalmsteen.inrupt.net and find out about new releases, upcoming shows, purchase his new book, or a custom guitar. What about vacations, travel, and things like that. I see the Solid ecosystem being built out by all kinds of business selling products and services. I donā€™t see solid as just a storage container for data, but a thriving ecosystem that brings forth all types of business. Why donā€™t you try and type in at random keywords for products like trucks, cars, boats, yachts, 666 https://666.solid.community, superman, guitars, dresses, shoes, or just about anything you can think of followed by solid.community or inrupt.net and then you can ask yourself, why would people be reserving accounts under all these keywords? Because they want to sell products, services and maybe just post information related to the keyword but, I believe that it is for the obvious. Thank you for your thoughts.

It should also be noted that there are more user names on solid related to products and services and keywords for seo then any thing else. So while some may be registering solid pods for their own personal use, there are thousands upon thousands of user accounts in the direction of keyword product placement and service related usernames as well.

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While some developers want to focus on writing code for apps, others may focus on doing other things with solid that are more conducive to their specific vision, and position. Some want solid to be isolated and free from spam adds and clickbait but, that is not realistic. There are thousands of affiliate websites out there that sell everything from products to information, and then theres google adwords and the list is endless. Solid provides an opportunity of a fresh start with regards to how keywords are used and in what manner. Solid needs more data! From everywhere, including people selling products, services, among other things to the members of the solid community. I am not talking about google search rankings per-say, or how a product will appear on google search engine among other similar products. I am talking about those who would prefer the notion of, by the solid community, and for the solid community. Brand Loyalty, product loyalty, solid loyalty.

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Iā€™m in agreement that the actual PODs are not going to be worth anything like traditional domains. It may not even be that our public homepages are editable in the way they are now in the long run for the very examples youā€™re presenting. Itā€™s more likely that youā€™re again going to be fighting for usernames on the Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc competitors that eventually popup that point to a specific set of data on your POD (this is what Iā€™ve been thinking about as Iā€™ve been building out my project because people are not going to want just one instance of something, they might want 50 usernames somewhere to build affiliate link focused pages or whatever else, but they want it all on the same webId). I just see the webId as a way to identify yourself to an app and otherwise not a name youā€™re going to share to your friends/customers for social networking purposes.

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Hi Jessica,
I see your from Texas, I grew up there, and just returned from Houston a couple days ago. Nice to see a fellow Texan on Solid. Remember the saying, everything in Texas is bigger! Solid is not small, it is not relegated to one instance or use. If you choose to use Solid for the sole purposes of it being a browser for your apps, thatā€™s great and I wish you all the best with it.

On the other hand, there is more to Solid than you are acknowledging at this time. The homepages will always be editable in the way they are now, and in the long run, that has already been established. Your Solid Pod URL is like the homepage for your Solid Pod. Your Solid WebID is your globally unique name that you can use to identify and authenticate yourself with other Solid Pods across the world. see. https://solid.community/register

I would suggest a read on the https://github.com/megoth/solid-update-index-tutorial. There are no limitation to the changes you can make to the front pageā€¦ so go wild if you want.ā€

We must face the reality that Solid is not a single use developer platform only. It is a personal browser and data store with your own profile, no matter if youā€™re a person, business, school or government. Solid is interpreted to mean, Socially Linked Data. So if I build out an ecosystem for the purposes of commercial enterprise using Solid WebIdā€™s to identify the products and services I am offering, are you saying that you would not use any of them?

I am putting together a unique products and services marketplace. Where you can view and shop for various products, and services related to several industries that include sports, vacation, education, social media, forums, shopping, flights, weather, location services, benefits, payments, careers, and many other subjects. Ideally, each site will include information on the subject site, a page with other affiliate sites, and the product or service related ads regarding the subject that a person may want to obtain, or not!

We have to build out Solid for the masses, for the day when mass migration occurs, there has to be more than just a apps for sale, and personal profile shopping. So do you believe Solid is a marketplace for your data and apps only? And the project you are working on, is that an app to sell something, or an app your creating for sale, and what of your personal profile, is that not to sell yourself, be it for trust or a job, or just to have a place where you can remain private, secluded from society, excluded because your different? Solid is a data store, you can use solid to host your data, and you can even sell your data, buy data, or buy and sell product and services that you host on Solid. You can play games like Chess, or just about anything else you can imagine.

ā€œSolid is an ecosystem, everyone is welcome here. WebID usernames are just as important on solid, as they are on twitter, instagram, and other social media sites.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

BTW: If you were to exclude all of the unique keyword usernames people have registered on solid, you would remove over 2/3 of the Solid Users registered to date.

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@adventure the greatest thing about Solid is that it means different things to different people, which is great because there is something for everyone.

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