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Phone Numbers Instead of URLs?
December writes "This story says Australian company Nascomms claims to be the first in the world to go online with numeric addressing [CT:TCP/IP uses numbers too, just not ones with area code ;)], in which telephone numbers are used in replace of the ubiquitous dot-com address.
Interesting idea, but in the business case, I could much more easily guess www.toyota.com then figuring out their phone number."
It's really very unhealthy to be concerned about how people think of an IPv4 address. You should prefer to smack yourself in the head with a bat.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Here's the link (no, it's not goatsex :). This seems kind of going backward - I mean the whole idea re fqdn is for us humans to not have to deal w/ numbers, yes?
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I have a theory that even phone numbers will go to the wayside in the 5-10 year range. Seriously, why should I have to remember Joe Blow's phone number? A good phone service would be a voice recognition which lets me say in effect that I want to talk to Joe Blow in Detroit. The system then would do the dirty work of resolving this into a phone number. Just as we think it is antiquated how our grandparents had to ask an operator to connect the wires to make a call, or use a party line, I believe remembering phone numbers will a thing of the past in the near future.
I'm rambling just a little, but the point is that the future involves letting machines do what they do well... dealing with number. Let us humans do what we do well, interconnnecting concepts. Names have better hinges to concepts than numbers for most of us.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
the phone is the ideal standard for usability
The book "The design of everyday things" talks a bit against this.
Do you know how to transfer a call to another phone? Do you know how to do it if you are not in your company system?
What are # and * for?
The basic stuff can seem easy but it may get very hard.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
like 1-900-ENCOEUR for example.
If you want to find good "name" for your telephone number, try http://www.phonespell.org/ it's pretty funny and works well.
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
First of all, by the time I'd loaded the page, I'd already mentally composed the obligatory joke about how maybe this could be supplemented by a global directory system that would associate names with the numbers, so you wouldn't have to remember them; it could even be built into the applications, so you would just type the name and have it automatically look up the number... but I see it's been done too many times already.
Your first point (Local businesses that just want to use their website to advertise a storefront rather than be an e-business) is interesting, though, in that this problem has been one of my biggest gripes all along. Most of us seem to agree that DNS is suffering under the "pollution" of the "com" TLD, which is even spilling over into "org" and "net". I think a large part of the problem is the fact that these global domains flatten everything into a single namespace, which is ironic since DNS' original solution to the namespace problem was to make it hierarchical.
If a local business just wants to advertise in its area, why should it have to have a unique name in a flat global namespace? It then has to hope that its name has not been "taken" by a big company, a more-ambitious startup, another local business somewhere else, a porn site, etc. This leads to the crowdedness which has given us the "aridiculousnumberofwordsconcatenatedtogether.com
Even among the startups, there are lots that are geographic-region-specific -- they even specifically advertise the fact that they concentrate their service in that area (supposedly making it better than the others whose efforts are spread so much thinner). And yet, they use the same global namespace, making their names even messier by mushing the region in. I've lived here all my life, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that the San Francisco Bay Area is the only area in the world near a bay who residents call it "the Bay Area", and yet we have "bayarea.com".
I've always thought we should use the existing country and region domains for things that are region-specific. Then, "bayarea.com" could be "bayarea.ca.us", "bajobs.com" could be "jobs.sfba.ca.us", and a little mom-and-pop store in Berkeley could be "mom-and-pop.sfba.ca.us" or "mom-and-pop.berkeley.ca.us" without having to worry about collisions with "mom-and-pop.nyc.ny.us", etc. The argument is, of course, that people have been conditioned to think that "website" is synonymous with "something dot com", and would be afraid of anything with more than one dot. I don't know that that's true, though: people can understand phone numbers with area codes, postal addresses with ZIP codes, etc., and I think most would automatically recognize their region code as being analogous, so if local sites advertised with it, it would begin to seem natural. For some reason, though, they are not popular. What makes this phone-number thing interesting is that it puts a novel spin on the idea, which could poularize it, even though it's not really any better.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Your IP address would change because of an area code split?
Joseph W. Breu
There's a Cambridge (UK) company called bango.net thats been doing this for a while. Its the silliest idea I've ever heard of. Have a system for translating names to numbers and then layer a system for translating numbers to names on top of it. Doh.
This way we could look up the numbers online or in a great big book that would have all the phone numbers in the world.
Who thought this up? Was he pithed?
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It is true there are these things called IP addresses, with 32 (or 128 with v6) bits to allocate to servers, but one of the things about IP addresses is that they are meant not to convey any information about where you are or what area your company happens to service.
On reading this I thought this was a damn silly idea, but at least with these numbers you stand a chance of dealing with a local company. However, its simpler just to enter www.dominospizza.com in your browser and look search for the local shop.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
But phone numbers ARE a bad system. Here in Dallas, TX, we've got a stack of area codes. These area codes have changed at least twice in the last 20 years. Looking at a telephone number with the 817 area code (mostly Ft. Worth and the mid-cities, including Arlington where I go to school) it's impossible to tell ahead of time whether or not I'm supposed to dial a 1 at the beginning. (Note that if I dial a 1, it costs more to complete the call across town than to California, but that's a different rant...)
Yes, this is do-able, but it's not elegant, and it's not simple. I, for one, HATE that horrible tri-tone thing that you get when you misdial a number, particularly because I'm usually using a headset on my phones.
If phone numbers were such a great system, why do we need a phone book? A computer provides a much richer user interface that a 12-key telephone. Why not use it? And people who are uncomfortable with computers aren't suddenly going to warm up to them because they can type in a telephone number.
URLs aren't perfect, but they're a damn sight better than phone numbers. Any user who can't operate Yahoo or Google is unlikely to want to use the computer for much of anything anyhow.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
ringmysite.com was earlier and is free.
Maybe I could write a program to associate a name with the number..
It makes sense. No more close approximations of the company name, no more .com/.org/.net confusion, no more wondering if it's hyphenated or not. And since the phone number had to be unique by nature, you get the right place every time.
Hell, even if it were only a re-direct to the regular URL, that would be something.
However, IMO the phone is the ideal standard for usability. Anyone with the least bit of technical savvy can buy a $20 phone (they even have them in supermarkets, of all places) plug it in, pick up the receiver, and dial people's phone numbers. Remembering the numbers is not the hardest part of the ordeal: even inexpensive phones have speed dial nowadays, and I don't go anywhere without my organizer and its phone numbers.
Compare this to using a computer. We all hate being disconnected on the phone, but that almost never happens when you compare it to using a computer. I can talk on the phone, walk around, and do all sorts of other tasks at the same time without the phone's performance being affected. (My attention span, on the other hand...) The look and feel of phones may differ stylistically, but the procedure is always the same: pick up phone, dial numbers. Compare that with the ever-changing UI standards of computer OS's, and the navigation controls on web pages that often puzzle newbies. "Press 1 for function x, 2 for function y,..." may sound annoying, but (i) we all know how to do this and (ii) frequent users don't even need to listen to the prompts any more.
Many Internet sites are realizing the ubiquity and relative reliability of the phone system. I can get my Yahoo! Mail by calling 1-800-MY-YAHOO. I can get weather forecasts from MIT by calling 1-888-573-TALK. Weather forecasts and a lot of other functions are available through TellMe (1-800-555-TELL). They're realizing that while the telephone isn't perfect, there is still a lot of functionality that it can carry out.
For more information, click here.
2) Make use of higher-level domains more extensively
Great idea, but we'll never convince corporations. If they come up with a great product/service/whatever they will want the domain-name for that as well as for their company, and a dozen more...
The problem here is the registrars who don't know how to say "no" or "that's your nth domain so the price will be X*2^n" or even "proof that is a recognised trading name of your company please".
It would be kinda cool if both phone numbers and domain names resolved to the same website.
You'd first need to convince the ISC to update bind to include the '+' character in the valid character set for DNS. Also how do you cope with organisations which print their phone numbers in all sorts of strange ways. If you could rely upon the full number to be printed without spaces then it just might be workable.
... at INET this summer, in Yokohama. Completely mad. Thinks numbers are more memorable than names, and his numbers are more memorable than IP numbers. So he wants to put a new addressing indirection layer on the Internet, to translate hopelessly unmemorable numbers into other hoelessly unmemorable numbers, so that people won't have to remember names. I expect his children are called 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Totally mad. Quite a pleasant guy to share a beer with, but...
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
First, they were 1-800-Flowers.
Then, they were (and are) 1800Flowers.com.
Would they be 1-800-Flowers again?
And would my numpad get phone-like letters applied to the keys? And would it be switched? But I digress.
Does this mean that http://911 will get me the police? This will bring trolling to a whole new level.
Ugh.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
I don't know, 1-800-DRUIDIA is pretty easy to remember. :)
-Michael
They use weird names for their nameservers that are like the ones you mentioned:
Numbers are great for routing, but when it comes to user interfaces, Names are the way to go. Making phone numbers as pointers to websites is as advancing as not using IP for 2nd Generation wireless.
...and so on... For many, a phone is becoming outdated technology. For us to remember an email address or a website no problem... for us to find a website or an email address... well there's google, 411 and maqpuest so that about covers finding almost any company or private informaton necessary.
The goal is to advance technology... not to regress to a bad system.
Unfortunately, this is the goal of the Geek, not the goal of business. The goal of business is to make money. This is commonly forgotten by geeks, and hence people point and laugh at the non-bisiness business model most web companies use.
Lets consider the technological make-up of the world today:
1. We have the 3rd world. Yes, these people are untapped "web" resources, but the reality is that a TRS-80 is considered high-tech for some of them. Whole towns don't have power, running water, and/or phones. Do you think that these people really care about reverse lookup DNS tables? These people are off of the eBusiness radar.
2. On the other extreme We have the Uber-geeks. These people are all about making everybodies lives easier - as long as they hold the secret knowledge as to how everything works. Why pay for a phone call, when you can email them? Why email them when you can ICQ them? why ICQ them when you can use voice over ip for free?
3. Then there are people like my inlaws... Who have internet access and a slough of questions, but don't care to listen. They waited patiently for 3 months until I was around over thanksgiving to remove a stuck CD becuase they didn't feel comfortable with a paperclip. Anyway, they can enter in a URL from the TV screen, but when toyota doesn't say www.toyota.com on their advertisement - they don't think to type it in. Some day they may figure it out - but I figure I'll have a few more trips out there before then...
4. People who aren't don't know anything about computers at all. There are actually a few people in business that still don't use a computer - and not all of them are auto mechanics. A lot of them are older, and very set in their ways. A phone number is a familiar item. They can punch it in and they know what they can expect to hear - someone from that company on the other end of the line. They can type it in on a computer, and amazingly it would take them to the website. Not only have you adapted current technology now to a familiar frame, but you have actively encouraged someone else to see your business model. This are the largest untapped but available customer base for online companies PTFMA.
In addition, a telephone crossreference fixes many problems with domain squatters, two companies with similar names/different prodcuts, and provides most of america with an existing directory structure to find the company they are looking for (the Yellow Pages).
Lastly, I personally prefer to shop locally when I can't get a better deal elsewhere. I could run through (617) business lines for the product I wanted. This would allow me to shop online - and have the convenience of doing so - but put the company close enough that if it broke, I could easily return it or exchange it.
anyways... phone numbers aren't a bad system - just one you wouldn't think to use given the current direction of technology. I however, see where this could be useful - and hence, profitable.
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You say you want a revolution?
This reminds me of Realnames who tried to map "real names" to DNS names. They still exist but does anyone use it? In fact companies seem to prefer changing there real names to match their domains! Here in the UK a frozen food superstore changed it's name to iceland.co.uk.
This sounds very similar to Bango, which is aimed primarily at WAP users, where numbers make a bit more sense.
Works for me! You could start your browser and type "0" to bring up the directory. Then type in a business or person's name and get a list of possibilities, each with a number that can be clicked on.
Standard trademark laws would be in place. Coca-Cola probably has rights to be the only Coca-Cola, but Smith Consulting would need city information to help you whittle it down.
Then, like a memory-dial phone, you would bookmark your most commonly visited sites and forget the number.
It doesn't have to be a phone number. It just has to be a unique number, like, oh say, your IP address.
The naming system sounds good until you try to pick a unique name and let your business rely on people spelling it right, or working out your messy attempt at a unique name. If you were Smith Consulting what would you use? smith-cons.com? What did you get the first time you tried to find Via, id, or Diamond? These are national companies. Now try to find a local carpentry service.
Also, it can be embarrasing to make a messy URL when they are suppose to be so obvious.
I don't know how many people here pay attention to infomercials, but there is a large trend for them to register a domain so that their URL is http://www.800-123-4567.com with the phone number being the same that you dial or order over the phone. I don't see how they can claim they are the first to the patent office.
-no broken link
Indeed, and the related idea of embedding telephone numbers in extended addresses has long been used in the OSI world. See, for example, RFC1888.
The correct link is here.
On the other hand, for those using Altavista, or Lycos, or what have you, or who don't know how to properly refine a query, could have more difficulty. This could be a real boon for those people, as now you can simply look them up in the yellow pages.
Now whether or not we WANT those people to be able to use the Internet more easily is a question that goes beyond the scope of this post...
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Not quite sure what they are trying to achieve really.. The only phone numbers that mean anything to most people are 999 (or 911) and their personal phone numbers. Oh well.. another company that will be hyped up just before a share issue and then fade away like an ice cube in an oven.
I hardly think it merits a patent, but it does offer advantages over "http://123.123.123" and looks cleaner than "http://www.555-1234.com".
My mom is not a Karma whore!
It's also wrong.
An IPv4 address is a sequence of 4 numbers (bytes), grouped into sets of one.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
I'm still waiting for the first person to send me such a 'cool new domain name'. Most Dutch people who wanted a domain simply got a .org/.net instead or asked a friend at some company to register it for them.
I wonder if people on working to get it to work the other way arround. It would be great to have to dial a .com address instead of having to remember a phone number.
Monkey sense
A UK Company had a similar idea selling off Bango (!) [TM] numbers to people with the intention of making URLS easier to type into mobiles.
Bango.net
They were selling them off at some stupid rates for small numbers - and for some reason they've dished out really attractive numbers to local companies - e.g. 12345 is a regional newspaper.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I can nominate them for a potential failure at FuckedCompany.com. Should earn me some points!
That's just an amazing waste of ~$30/year. If I wanted a numerical way to see a website, I'd do like others have said and use the IP address. Besides, what kind of mess would we have if we ran out of these addresses? I live in Southern California, and we seem to split area codes every few seconds. They just want money, I can forsee them profiled here in the near future.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
So remember this when you're browsing. The websites can calculate your physical position right down to a 2-mile radius. That's more than close enough for an ICBM!
Big Brother is watching you, and he doesn't like what he sees...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
already in existance just with URLs, this should make a real stack of them about the time we get another area code split in say, 805, and all those wonderful tables have to be changed.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Does my bum look big in this?
Score: -1, Redundant.
Separating the two concerns would give you a system where you have a two step resolution: human readable to location independent numbers, followed by location independent numbers to IP addresses. Such a split gives you a lot more flexibility on mapping the human readable names because you can change the mapping without having all the web pages that point to the affected hosts go bad.
Of course, these location independent numbers should not be phone numbers, since phone numbers do, in fact, change.
Numbers are great for routing, but when it comes to user interfaces, Names are the way to go. Making phone numbers as pointers to websites is as advancing as not using IP for 2nd Generation wireless.
The goal is to advance technology... not to regress to a bad system.
Corrected link: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20001128/tc/will_p hone_numbers_replace_urls__1.html
I seem to recall an article involving the relative difficulty of getting to a web site as compared to dialing a telephone. At the time, "web tone" was a hot buzzword. Many companies were using it to describe what they saw as the ideal user experience for the web - it should work as easily as a telephone.
Except that when you think about it, telephones are pretty damn hard to work. Buy a cheap US$20 phone in a department store. Plug it in. To dial, you have to lift the receiver, wait for the dial tone, then punch in this obscure sequence of ten (in the US, anyway) digits. If you don't know what they are, you have to look them up in a book, or call another number to ask someone. If you misdial, you run the risk of bothering some shmuck in his living room. Etc. The point of the article being, phones aren't as easy to use as everyone seems to give them credit for. We've just been using them since we were kids. Come to think of it - no kid I know who's been using the web for any period of time thinks it needs to be that much easier to use.
And of course, this neglects an obvious question: what happens if you have to change your phone number?
Actually, so far as I know, the very first time this was done was in about 1993, when Marshall Rose and Carl Malamud introduced a really interesting free fax gateway network at Interop, back when it was the *only* Internet show. Their setup is documented in RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530, which precede 2916 by a fair amount. :-)
.int registered) was designed to let the then-new MIME deliver a TIFF/F format file via e-mail to a fax machine accessible to a remote fax server.
The system, called tpc.int (which was only about the fifth or sixth
Shortly after it was launched using the awkward backwards phone number with every digit separated by a dot syntax, someone (and his name escapes me for the moment) hacked up a special DNS zone to eliminate the extraneous dots and reverse the number. This system is still in use today at tpc.int, where you can already address tpc.int servers by phone number the same way you have for over seven years.
If you've got some spare cycles and a lightly used phone line lying around, and unmetered local access, you should consider setting up a tpc.int server for your area. It's fun, and you'll learn a lot about MIME, mail processing, and neat DNS tricks in the process...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
"Your access is important to us. Please hold.", "We're sorry, the URL you are trying to reach is busy." and "We're sorry, the number you have typed is out of service. Please disconnect (from the Internet) and try your number again. This is a recording."
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crap.
ahh crap this is a net number...
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... And our phone numbers should be replaced with domain names/ip addresses. I think that's what the future will bring, seeing as email and chat rooms are becoming more and more popular... Not to mention that house phones will be replaced by wireless...
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Here is the article.
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Wife: Hon? It's still busy...
Husband: *snicker* Keeeeep tryin'. Call again.
Wife: (dialing aloud) 1-2-7, 0, 0, 1... damn! Busy!
Husband: Dear, I gave you the number earlier. You're the one who wanted to eat at Chez Expensif. Why didn't you make reservations?
Wife: I've been dialing ALL DAY!!!
See RFC2916 This describes how to map E.164 numbers (telephone numbers) in the DNS. The primary purpose is so that you can email your phone (for example), but there is nothing to stop this system mapping a phone number to a WWW page. Unfortunately this RFC uses the existing reverse-DNS .arpa domain so the phone numbers are written BACKWARDS! Not very friendly.
Seriously, wouldn't the easiest way to accomplish this be to just turn off DNS
--Ty
"We expect that figure to grow incredulously over the next few months," Nacomms general manager Siobhan Dooley told ZDNet.
I, for one, am certainly incredulous about the growth prospects.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!