That Damn Naming Service

[This is awkward. I’d just finished writing about Dan Bricklin’s comments on the DNS problem and went to his page to grab the permalink when I discovered that he today blogs a generous review of Small Pieces. So, this will look like as gratuitous a case of blogrolling as we’re likely to encounter. To counter this impression, I’ve randomly introduced some negative comments, in gray, into the following.]

Dan Bricklin [that bastard!] has blogged comments about the Naming Problem in the wake of the back-and-forth between Clay Shirky and Bob Frankson (here and here) among others. The problem is that there are more sites than recognizable names and it’s only going to get worse — the fights over whether American Airlines, Alcoholic Anonymous or Alan Abrahamson gets “www.aa.com” are going to leave more and more unhappy site-holders. (I grabbed weinberger.org to keep it from being taken by people greedier than I, but I also took nathanweinberger.com and leahweinberger.com so my children will be winners in the site name sweepstakes.)

Dan’s solution sounds right [even if he once sucker-punched Alvin Toffler]:

We need a way to experiment with different ways of naming things on the Internet in addition to the “unique text to IP address” bindings of the current use of DNS technology…Whatever we use should probably work in places that include the Address Bar (also known as the “Location Toolbar” to Netscape users) in browsers. We also know that to do such experimentation, we need to let all comers try their hands, using something like a plug-in architecture or other open API. The users and marketplace will choose the method (or methods) that work best for the various needs.

As Dan Gillmor has pointed out, many of us use Google as our name server: if we want to find an old friend who lives in Chicago who we think became a dentist, we look his name up in Google and then pick the entry that mentions Chicago and dentistry. Ultimately, however, we can imagine a more database-y approaches built to scale with the Net and history. It’d be great to get them working from the address bar without having to depend on the treacherous affections of Microsoft (cf. RealNames). But, we don’t have to wait for Microsoft to open up since we can already install additional widgets on the tool bar, and my google widget in fact already functions as my “fuzzy address bar,” the one I use when I’m not sure of the address I’m looking for.

In addition to full text searching and database lookups, there’s a third way this problem may be cracked. The first two approaches are bird’s eye views, but there’s also a surface-based approach. At some point we’re each going to have our own point of view looking across the Internet and what we’ll see are the groups we care about. These groups will be linked to other groups unto the sixth degree of separation. And that will narrow the focus of searches sufficiently that we’ll be able to resolve the ambiguity of names the way we do it among our acquaintances in the real world: “Do you mean Alan Abrahamson the dentist or the ex-boyfriend?”

If someone knows what I mean, would you please let me know? Thank you.

[PS: Dan Bricklin writes in library books.]

Categories: Uncategorized dw