In message <59f980d60908051602y1fe364devfb5f590a8c795...@mail.gmail.com>, Ben S cott writes: > On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Chris Adams<cmad...@hiwaay.net> wrote: > >>> ... we may not longer have the end user =93typing=94 a URL, the DNS or > >>> something similar will still be in the background providing name to add= > ress > >>> mapping ... > >> > >> =A0 In the the vast majority of cases I have seen, people don't type > >> domain names, they search the web. =A0When they do type a domain name, > >> they usually type it into the Google search box. > > > > Web !=3D Internet. > > (Web !=3D Internet) !=3D 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.)
Which requires that people type addresses in in the first place. It's like these anti spam proceedures which require that you respond to a message that says you sent the email to let it through. I doesn't work if everyone or even if most do it. > 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...) No they make finding a unique id easy by leveraging a existing globally unique system. > Web browsers already automatically fill-in one's email address if > you let them. Which you have typed into the web browser in the first place. > 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. 1 if you actually want people to get to you and not your competitor. There is a reason people put phone numbers in advertisments rather than say "look us up in the yellow/white pages". > 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. There is a difference between looking for a service and looking for a specific vendor of a service. > 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. People may not know what a domain name is but they will use them all the time even if they are not aware of it. Google Twitter, Facebook etc. all depend on a working DNS whether they make it use visible to user or not. Mark > -- Ben <google!gmail!mailvortex> -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: ma...@isc.org