I had an interesting discussion yesterday with Brian Pontarelli, the Director of Technology at a Chicago-based Web 2.0 startup called Naymz. I had heard of Naymz at the Web 2.0 conference I attended a couple weeks ago in Amsterdam, and when I found that I was going to be attending a conference just a few miles away from Naymz’s galactic headquarters, I asked Brian if he would spend a few minutes explaining what his company is all about, and where he thinks some of the Web 2.0 technologies are headed.

In a nutshell, Naymz is an “identity aggregator” — i.e., a mechanism (and a Web page) to help pull together all of the bits and pieces of information that many Internet users have scattered all over the place. Thus, it’s not really aimed at people like me, who have a more-or-less well-organized web site that people can easily find. Instead, it’s for the other 99% of the human race that doesn’t have a traditional web site, but does have a MySpace page, a Friendster page, a bunch of photos on Flickr, and so forth. Thus, it may well be of primary interest to the high school kids, the college students, and the young 20-something adults who have made the MySpace et al sites so popular in recent years. Rather than jumping around all over the place, and having to know how to go about searching for someone in these different environments, you simply go to the Naymz site.

Indeed, Naymz has made it even simpler and more powerful: they theorize (correctly, I believe) that the whole process begins when you decide to search for information about someone by googling him or her. And what you would really like to see, at the top of the list of Google “hits,” is a single link that will point you to all of the miscellaneous bits and pieces of information about that person. And that’s what Naymz does: if you create a listing with their service, they’ll buy the combination of your first name and last name from the ad-click services of Google, MSN, and AOL, and then list your name prominently near the top of the list of hits whenever anyone uses those search engines to look for you. Clicking on the link takes end-users to the your “profile” page on the Naymz site, where they find something roughly equivalent to an informal “home page” that can be constructed with various publicly-available web-building tools. To give you an idea of what I put together in about five minutes, here’s my Naymz profile page.

As is common with several Web service providers, there’s a free version and a paid “premium” version ($4.95/month, or $47.50 for a paid-in-advance annual subscription). According to the Naymz website, premium account listings will appear at the top of search results, while basic account listings will appear within the “natural” results of the search. Premium listings will be posted ASAP, while basic listings may take up to a few weeks to appear in search results; this may be relevant for the individuals who have an urgent need to get their name prominently listed in a hurry. Both accounts receive a personal Naymz profile page with identical features, but basic account profiles may contain sponsor ads or promotional information.

Interestingly, it didn’t quite work out that way when I signed up for a premium listing. When I do a Google search for “Ed Yourdon”, the first item on the non-commercial, left-hand list of hits is — of all things! — a link to a moviefone.com page that lists a couple of the things I wrote during the Y2K era. That’s followed by a link to my own web site, a Wikipedia page about me, and a few other straightforward links. Over on the right side of the search page, where commercially-sponsored links appear, the first item is a link to PathfinderMDA, which has nothing to do with me (nor do I have anything to do with it); that’s followed by an Amazon link titled “Books by Ed Yourdon,” which one might presume would take you to a page on the Amazon site listing all of the books I’ve written. But instead, it displays a page with only 5 entries, including a JavaBeans book that I had nothing to do with, a book of collected project management articles that includes one of my papers, and two out-of-print books that I co-authored back in the early 1980s; my two most recent books aren’t even on the list. Finally, after the abortive Amazon link, the Naymz link appears …

Of course, neither the moviefone.com listing, the PathfinderMDA listing, nor the bizarre Amazon link are the fault or responsibility of Naymz; I was reasonably happy that their link showed up reasonably prominently. And I have to admit that it’s kind of handy to be able to pull together links to my Flickr site, my LinkedIn site, and a bio page on the Cutter Consortium site. Of course, I could (and should) put these links on my regular website, but most people don’t have that option. Not only that, but it takes a bit of work to figure out the appropriate URL syntax to access your own page within “community” sites like Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, and others — and Naymz does most of the detailed coding work for you, with simple instructions for creating the appropriate links.

So it’s an interesting service — but these are early days, and it remains to be seen whether it will survive and prosper. Brian Pontarelli told me that Naymz currently has about 1,200 subscribers (probably more by the time you read this), and is planning for a formal launch in August. As for the business model: as noted earlier, subscribers who choose the free basic service have to put up with advertising on their profile page; and those who choose the premium service (like me) cough up a modest up-front subscription fee. Whether that’s enough to pay the office rent and the salaries for Naymz’s five employees is an open question; but one of the nice things about Web 2.0 companies like Naymz is that their overhead and “burn rate” is substantially smaller than it was for comparable companies in the Web 1.0 era a decade ago. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, they’ll get gobbled up by one of the bigger players in the Web 2.0 space.

As we discussed the technology behind the Naymz service, Pontarelli offered some interesting ideas and perspectives about the technologies driving Web 2.0. He pointed out that while many people describe the underlying technology as a “simple” matter of Ajax, it actually requires developers to have a reasonable degree of familiarity and competence with several different Web languages: XML, CSS, Javascript, HTML, and HTTP. Most of these are pretty basic and familiar, of course, but putting them all together isn’t trivial. And the problem is compounded by the fact that things like Javascript don’t yet have rigorously defined, standardized, predictable behaviors in areas like multi-thread behavior; among other things, developers of Web 2.0 services have to assume that the behavior of their services may be different, in subtle and non-obvious ways, on browsers like IE, Netscape, Safari, Firefox, and Opera (not to mention subtle differences between the current version and version N-1 of these browsers). Thus, he thinks that one of the big changes we should expect to see over the next decade — perhaps as part of Web 3.0? — is a rigorous, standardized, formally defined “unifying” technology that will pull all of this together.

But while the programmers grapple with the technical problems in the background, Pontarelli feels that the really big impact of Web 2.0 will be more “philosophical” than technical; I completely agree with him. For example, he says, users are increasingly unwilling to put up with old Web 1.0 sites that force them to enter an entire transaction (e.g., if they’re carrying out an e-commerce transaction) before learning that one of the data entry fields was incorrect — after which the entire Web page is refreshed, and all of the previously-entered data (most of which was valid and correct) disappears, and has to be re-entered. And on a deeper philosophical level, end-users want to have more and more control over how they find information (by having some influence over the awesome power of the Google search) and how they aggregate information. Naymz provides an interesting and innovative way of influencing both searching and aggregation, and I’m hopeful that the marketplace will determine that it’s a service that deserves to survive and prosper.