Convenience Expected

On the Net, links have been the way to reference for a long time. Nicholson Baker added a YouTube URL in his (physical) book but then wondered whether the link mechanism could be improved:

“Well, I really want people to listen to Stephen Fearing…And of course the worst possible way to tell them to go, I guess, is to give them a dead YouTube link, because they’re going to make a typo…So I kind of blew it.”

Alan Jacobs took that point and narrated a brief history of the URL. Explaining that a URL is a proxy to the IP address of the site, he said:

“For human beings, the former is easier to remember than the latter.”

But then as websites exploded, Jacobs points out that the URL’s got too long to remember. Jacobs agrees that this may not be an issue because:

“And anyway, within the last decade more and more people have been giving up on even a basic understanding of URLs, trusting Google results instead. Google’s highlighted blue links — in your own language! — offer a layer of additional, simplified comprehensibility above the layer of alphabetic comprehensibility that Berners-Lee created to cover the basically incomprehensible layer of the IP address.”

In case you lost the trail, let Jacobs summarize:

“The creation of the address itself was the first stage; the creation of the URL the second; the preferential use of the search engine the third.”

The next step, as Jacobs says, has been voice activated search. As in Apple’s Siri or Google’s, er, voice search feature.

But even the next step has already been achieved, with a fair degree of success. I guess Jacobs didn’t know about it, but it’s what Phil Libin wrote about today’s world:

“By the time you search, something’s already failed.”

Services like Google Now (see my earlier blog on that) already get the information you need before you ask the question! Of course, that’s achieved by mining a whole lot of data (your search history, e-mail, calendar, location via the smartphone to name a few). That, of course, raises privacy concerns.

Just goes to show that beyond a point, convenience comes at a price…even in the digital age where most things are free.