Javia blog

Typing text on a phone’s “12key” keypad has a different metric than typing on a normal computer keyboard. Typing on a phone comes in two flavors:

• using predictive input (T9), where you only hit each key corresponding to a letter once, and the word is disambiguated based on a dictionary
• using repeated key presses to select the individual letter from the group of 3 (or more) letters associated to a key

When typing URLs a dictionary is not very helpful, because usually the URLs aren’t composed of dictionary words. This means we can’t use T9 for URLs, so we’re left with the “repeated presses” typing method.

The slowest typing situation happens when one has to type successive letters that are located on the same key. Example: typing “abac” is slow. All these letters (a, b, c) are located on the same key “2abc”. You have to make a small pause after each letter to indicate the advancing to the next letter. Were the successive letters located on different keys, no such pause would be necessary.

I’ve written a small script which computes the cost of typing a given text on a phone keypad. You enter any text and it shows a number, the cost. The smaller this number, the easier/faster to type is the text:

http://frumos.com/cost.html

(by the way, this is the first Javascript code I’ve ever written)

For example, here are some text fragments, with their respective costs (smaller cost is better):

Let’s suppose that all the domain names start with “www.”, like “www.name.com”. This means that the leading “www.” doesn’t apport any information (because, as we supposed, every domain has it). You could just as well trasmit your name as “name.com”, knowing that the receiver will automatically add the necessary leading “www.”.

I mean that the leading “www.” doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s just a sort of historical garbage, and will be dispensed of. Your website name should be “name.com”. The domain “www.name.com” would redirect to the canonic domain, “name.com”.

This has the advantage that your name is shorter. A short name is friendlier for your users, because it’s they who have to type it, write it down, etc.

The dropping of the leading “www.” is already happening on the web; in a few year’s time, “www.” will be history. This gives us an easy way to spot the web dinosaurs, the domainers who are stuck in the past; a dinosaur is a domain which can only be accessed as “www.name.com”, while the shorter form “name.com” gives an error.

An example: www.whois.eu works, while whois.eu doesn’t work — Eurid, the operator of whois.eu (sorry, I meant to say www.whois.eu), is the paradoxical new dinosaur on the web.

After some lenghty deliberation, I settled for the name “javia”.
I hope it sounds acceptable in English. The name may come from ‘java’ and ‘via’; anyway, it’s important to be nice-sounding, memorable, and short.

I would have liked to get the domain name in the .com TLD. Unfortunately, javia.com is not available, as it is owned by a domain-name pirate, boasting a ‘domain-for-sale’ note on the landing page.

A huge proportion of the domain names (I’d guess, as high as 80% in .com) is used for advertising and re-selling, and don’t represent legitimate uses associated with the respective name. I hate this state of affairs, and I consider that it represents a very serious problem. If the situation continues to aggravate, more and more domain names becoming un-available for the people who are willing to put on real websites, I expect this may even prompt an overhaul of the domain name system.

The domain-name pirates operate a huge number of domains. They get revenue through the advertising they put on the landing-pages on these domains, and by re-selling the demains for big-money. This is a dirty business; that’s why I won’t even consider buying a domain from such a pirate — because I don’t want to do anything to encourage their business.

I’m left with the choice between javia.org and javia.eu. The advantage of .eu is that it’s shorter than .org (and easier to type on a phone keyboard); the disadvantage of .eu is that it’s a new TLD, relativelly little known, and with a strong regional character (being a ‘country code’ TLD). But for me, the greatest disadvantage of .eu is that it is operated by a particularily incompetent registrar, Eurid. I think Eurid is a good exemple of the incompetence and beauraucracy characterizing the EU. They are even proud of their blunders (as in, “is not stupid enough, he who’s not proud of it”). The lamentable way in which they have run the .eu domain until now will have a lasting negative impact on this TLD. I guess I really hate them, and normally I wouldn’t want to use a domain in .eu. On the other side, .eu is shorter then .org…

For the sake of google keyword counts: “Eurid sucks”.