Apps and websites

I was talking with a friend about DNS and website addresses, and the sort of problems that can happen because so few people understand anything about it. This was shown by the Facebook/ReadWriteWeb/Google issue that happened a while back, where it was clearly shown that many people don’t use DNS or web addresses or bookmarks at all, they just search for something and choose the first result.

What occurred to me is that iPhone app icons are like a very visual and far easier address for the things people want to use. People who don’t know that Facebook lives at http://facebook.com are quite comfortable looking for the white ‘f’ on the blue background that represents Facebook on an iPhone. And so in a very real sense the iPhone springboard (the pages of app icons) has been a success where web addresses have not.