| This is nothing more than a (pointlessly!) complex URL shortener... Meshtags are exactly equivalent to the following hypothetical service which I call "SuperNumericShortener": 1. Pick any random number, say 1234. This is your identifier. 2. Register this identifier and your URL at SuperNumericShortener.com 3. Write "SNS-1234" anywhere you want. 4. Install a fancy smartphone app that can take a picture of a writing and recognize "SNS-1234". 5. The app opens your browser to http://SuperNumericShortener.com/1234 which redirects to whatever URL you chose. That's it. Oh and you can pay to reserve short identifiers (since they are likely to be claimed by other users of the service). And for some reason meshtags use triangular shapes instead of numbers. Maybe it makes the concept look fancier than what it really is. Or maybe the author thought it would be easier to recognize a meshtag than detecting the shape "SNS" and do OCR to extract the following identifier? Either way, "SNS-1234" is easier to memorize, faster to draw, can be communicated in writing and speech. All advantages that meshtags lack. Edit: here is something I would really want: in my Android Chrome address bar, next to the microphone icon, I want a camera icon that lets me snap a picture of a written URL, and opens it directly. No obscure QR code, meshtag, or whatever. |