
Death of the URL - mqt
http://blog.simon-cozens.org/post/view/1228
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chmike
The other significant benefit is that the key word is written in japanese
where URL are restricted to ASCII. Occidental people don't understand this
huge problem. Arabs and russian people are facing it too. Imagine a web page
in english for english people and you have to write an url in asian or arabe
script to reach it! Would you be able to remember such url when seen in an
advertisement ? The most surprising is that they didn't solved this problem
yet. This situation won't last. Yes urls are death ... in the sense PG gave to
this concept.

The distributed information system (DIS) I am currently working on is planned
to solve this.

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earthboundkid
I'm excited to hear someone is working on the problem do you have a link (err,
um, you know) to what you have so far?

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chmike
I booked the name <http://www.ditp.org> for it, but nothing is published yet.
Here you have some more info [<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=21287]>

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whacked_new
I believe the ad method described there is mostly unique to Japan. Most phones
have internet access, and there are quick access keys to web search. The text
box appears, and you type. So almost all ads involving websites show a text
box with the keyword inside. I never looked into this, but I suspect vendors
would pay for special keywords.

Meanwhile, I doubt a business model that applies to Japan would immediately be
useful elsewhere. The extensive train system in Japan means that ads placed in
trains are guaranteed to be seen, and passengers have their hands free to
press buttons on their phones. On the other hand, USA is all cars.

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youngnh
I think you're way off the mark. Advertising a keyword instead of a url is a
much more effective way of directing users to a specific page on a website.
AOL knew this, and when they were the dominant service provider tons of
companies would direct you to their site through an AOL keyword. Today I still
hear a lot of radio commercials encouraging listeners to get involved in
contests by going to their websites and entering a keyword.

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whacked_new
you are right; point taken.

the thing is, well, as a casual observer, i have noticed that in USA, take tv
ads for example, you would hear the company name repeated over and over.
Overstock.com Bigredo.com hotels.com... blah blah. In Japan, I recall a higher
frequency of ads, static and TV alike, go "search for blah."

but yeah, i have zero research behind that claim.

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danw
I'm surprised the ad doesnt also contain a QR code of some kind.

It's interesting to see the phone number url. A trade off between memorability
and ease of entry. Looks similar to the approach I'm taking with Mobile Open
ID where instead of user/email/password I have phone number and pin code.

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staunch
I'm in Japan and I notice URLs all over the place. Sure there's _way_ more
mobile use here, but there's also a flood of .jp's too. That said, it's always
good to keep in mind that millions of people get to google.com by typing
"Google" in Google.

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phil
Has been greatly exaggerated.

