Playing the name game on the internet

Web, web, bo beb, banana fanna fo feb, fee fi mo meb, web!

When we were kids, the answer to the question of interface was easy. Throw together a couple big plastic buttons in primary colors on a pink phone and you've got a very happy toddler. If it made a noise, it became more than just a toy-it was a tool of revenge.

As grown-ups, interface is bit more complicated. Our toys have lots of buttons and make lots of strange noises. The fundamental problem with the web today is that it is still too hard to use. It was a toy developed by a bunch of Wirehead physicists in Switzerland, and contrary to popular belief, not America Online. For new users especially, it can be very confusing. While banging on a beeping keyboard can be stress-relieving, it is rarely productive.

Today, more and more people are seeing the web in advertisements. They see these funny little addresses with lots of slashes and dots and they don't even know what to do with them.

What's worse is that often, the addresses don't mean much. The organization which hands out internet addresses, InterNic gives out addresses to the first taker.

For example, looks at Power Computing Corporation, the Macintosh Computer clone maker. Its address on the web is http://www.powercc.com/.

Let's take this address apart:

http://

A protocol specifier which tells the computer which language to use to read the document. The average user does not understand or even care what this is.

www.

Request For Comment (RFC) documents describe the rules and standards of the internet. One RFC standard (again, what does the average user care about RFCs?) says that the computer that carries an entity's world wide web pages should be called 'www'. But for web-only entities, like Yahoo! one of the online internet directories, the 'www' is irrelevant and unnecessary.

powercc

Here is the actual name of the company, but strangely abbreviated. How would anyone remember this?

.com/

So it's a company, but what does that tell you about how to get there?

First you have to search for internet search page if you can't remember the URL address for one offhand. Typing "Power Computing", you wade through the responses. Since 'power' and 'computing' are both common words, search engines find thousands of pages that have both of those words in it. Lycos finds over 9,000 pages with 'power' in them and 55,000 with 'computing' in them.

Hopefully you find a title that looks like the page you need and you click it. It brings you to random page at their site. If you're lucky there's some kind of 'home' button. If not, you wander around for a while.

Once you're there, you add it to your rapidly-growing bookmark list or write it down since you know you won't remember it.

Does this sound like a typical day on the web for you?

QuickFix solves all that. As an exclusive to the half-dozen or so faithful Wirehead readers out there, I would like to introduce QuickFix, the internet addressing solution.

Here's how find something on the web with QuickFix.

Go to QuickFix. Type 'power computing'. Hit return.

You're there, at the main page of Power Computing's web site.

Do it again:
Toy Story -> http://www.toystory.com/

and again:
The Bucknellian -> http://www.bucknell.edu/bucknellian/

and again:
Dave Maher -> http://www.bucknell.edu/~dmaher/

QuickFix addresses contain no slashes, no dots, nothing that isn't intuitive.

And in browser mode, QuickFix becomes a part of your web browser and may fundamentally change the way you use the internet.

If QuickFix doesn't take you right where you want to go, just click the 'show matches' box and hit return to see all the possibilities.

Stop banging on the keyboard and try it out.