[mikehollinger]

> People just google “bob builder” anyway.

Today they do. When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s, people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering.

It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books, along with the occasional “new phone, who dis?”

[delta_p_delta_x]

> When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering

This was the case well into the 2000s, if I recall correctly, and even into the mid-late 2010s, when URL shorteners proliferated to manage the complicated URLs generated by Google Forms etc.

[blowski]

> It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books

What's odd about that? I didn't really understand your comment.

[mikehollinger]

I can email [e-mail] but I can't "call" or "text" [e-mail] . You can kinda sorta see this now with imessage / facetime, but that's not consistent and implemented in a standard protocol.

[blowski]

So phone numbers could have become more semantic. Instead we have arbitrary phone numbers and wrap meaning around them.

I guess it’s been so long that I needed to find and type out a phone number that I don’t think about it any more.