Two questions come into my mind after this article:
- Will we still use domain names in 25 years? - How will addressing "things" look like in the future?
Your thoughts?
- Will we still use domain names in 25 years? - How will addressing "things" look like in the future?
Your thoughts?
I'd argue end-users barely use them anymore now. More and more the trend is to treat the gunk in the browser's location bar as an opaque blob. Navigation is done by searching, bookmarking, and clicking on links - not by typing domain names, which barely seem to need to exist anymore except as an implementation detail.
- How will addressing "things" look like in the future?
I'd bet on more and better kinds of search, and less having to remember stuff.
And you'd get no argument from me.
I don't think enough people have come to terms with the fact that for the average Internet user, Google is the Internet.
In my experience though, while the search terms are brief, they are usually not general, because they use Japanese other than what would naturally type to describe the product. For example, a tagline on a JR ad on the train today worked for me: "We can recommend you good lodgings. Just search for JR good lodgings." However, just like "good lodgings" is a little bit forced in American English, いい宿 is a little forced in Japanese.
Another favorite is making up a word in katakana. If you make up a word, you're going to own the search engine results for it by default. (Hint: works great for ideavirii. Think O'Reilly regrets "Web 2.0" one bit?)