On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Chris Adams<cmadams@hiwaay.net> wrote:
... we may not longer have the end user “typing” a URL, the DNS or something similar will still be in the background providing name to address mapping ...
In the the vast majority of cases I have seen, people don't type domain names, they search the web. When they do type a domain name, they usually type it into the Google search box.
Web != Internet.
(Web != Internet) != the_point Most people don't type email addresses, either. They pick from from their address book. Their address book knows the address because it auto-learned it from a previously received email. If their email program doesn't do that, they find an old email and hit "Reply". (You laugh, but even in my small experience, I've seen plenty of clusers who rarely originate an email. They reply to *everything*. You have to email them once for them to email you. It's always neat to get a message in my inbox that's a reply to a message from three years ago. But I digress.) User IDs on Facebook, Twitter, et. al., aren't email addresses, they're user IDs. They just happen to look just like email addresses, because nobody's come up with a better system yet. The main reason those services ask for the user's email address for an ID is it makes the "I forgot my user ID" support cases easier. (Note that it doesn't eliminate them. Some people still don't know their Facebook user ID until you tell them it's their email address. Then they ask what their email address is...) Web browsers already automatically fill-in one's email address if you let them. One of these days Microsoft or Mozilla or whoever will come up with a method to make the automation more seamless, and people will probabbly stop knowing their own email address. To do the initial exchange for a new person, they'll use Facebook. Or whatever. Paper advertisements: What's easier? (1) Publishing a URL in a print ad, and expecting people to remember it and type it correctly. (2) Saying "type our name into $SERVICE", where $SERVICE is some popular website that most people trust (like Facebook or whatever), and has come up with a workable system for disambiguation. You get the picture. Follow the trend. The systems aren't done evolving into being yet, but the avalanche has definitely started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote. As the person I was replying to said, DNS is unlikely to go away, but I'll lay good money that some day most people won't even know domain names exist, any more than they know IP addresses do. -- Ben <google!gmail!mailvortex>