nanog mailing list archives

Re: Dan Kaminsky


From: Mark Andrews <marka () isc org>
Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:30:23 +1000


In message <59f980d60908051602y1fe364devfb5f590a8c7959dc () mail gmail com>, Ben S
cott writes:
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Chris Adams<cmadams () 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: marka () isc org


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