Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!