SmartSpace Aims to Make Social Media Simple

JR — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:30:11 +0000

GoDaddy is trying to snag its share of the social media market with a new all-in-one 2.0 tool called SmartSpace. The service gives you a pre-made social setup available immediately upon domain registration, letting you blog and connect to multiple services via a relatively idiot-proof interface.

First, the Facts
The appeal here is in the one-stop shopping, hand-held approach — one that’s presumably geared more toward a novice Web user. At the same time, though, the pricing actually isn’t that bad. The service runs about $5 a month, which includes hosting. You do pay domain registration fees on top of that. At the moment, GoDaddy is dropping .com domains to $1.99 a year when purchased with the SmartSpace option.

Once you activate a domain, you get access to a content generation control panel that lets you click to add a ready-made blog, podcast hoster, chat room, or photo gallery to your site-in-a-box. You can stream in any RSS-based feeds as well as any Facebook profile, Flickr content, or YouTube content. The interface also has options to import your own non-site-specific content.

Impact Analysis
Some reviews are calling SmartSpace “amazing” and painting it as a real game-changer. I’m not sure I quite agree, at least not to that extreme. It’s a smart service and does bring 2.0 functionality to the non-tech-inclined masses in an easy-to-understand, nicely wrapped package — but I don’t suspect we’ll be hearing endless oohs and ahhs about it any time soon.

With that being said, I can think of plenty of Net novice friends who have long sought a simple, hassle-free way to build a basic (but function-full) Web site for themselves or for a project, but didn’t know where to even begin. In fact, I’ve had two such acquaintances approach me in the past few weeks with that exact kind of query. This sort of service could be right up their alley.

Our vote: Let’s be real — for most of the people reading The Inquisitr, SmartSpace isn’t going to be awe-inspiring. We’d sooner register our domain, host it where we want, and do with it what we want. But for the community of users like those aforementioned friends, it could actually prove to be a powerful and painless solution — and, no doubt, that’s exactly whom GoDaddy is going after. In that regard, the company has likely succeeded — and for its intended audience, SmartSpace is likely to be a hit.

Go Daddy

Report: GoDaddy Banned in China

JR — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:37:40 +0000

China has blocked all access to domain registrar GoDaddy, according to a report by censorship blog Moonlight. The block started before the end of the Olympics, Moonlight says, and can be traced to a router within China’s China Telecom service provider.

So what’s the real story here? We checked with the folks at GoDaddy, who initially acknowledged having seen the reports but ultimately came back with a “no comment” on the matter. Moonlight speculates the move may have an Olympic connection, and its logic makes sense: The Chinese government had banned anyone but the nation’s Olympic gold medalists from registering domains based on the athletes’ names within the “.cn” suffix. It even “advised” anyone who already owned such a domain to turn it over to the medalist “as a gift.”

Moonlight says the government wants to go a step further and force people to turn over those domains if they don’t do so on their own. If the domain is registered with an outside company such as GoDaddy, however — as opposed to with China’s own CNNIC domain registry service — the government won’t be able to gain control and seize the name.

That theory, of course, is no more than speculation at this point — though, from the looks of it, an official explanation may not be in our sights any time soon.

Go Daddy

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SmartSpace Aims to Make Social Media Simple

Report: GoDaddy Banned in China