I heard from Cheryl Hall of the Dallas Morning News about “1-800” Roy Weber of AT&T - the scientist that invented and demanded the adoption of the 1-800 number, an institution that certainly has (among other things) been the dominant metaphor in how we communicate that someone is the source of some service.
Everything from 1-800-Flowers to 1-800-Need-Him has used the ubiquity of the telephone and the simplicity of the call to action to drive people to connecting with them. And we used it as a joke to mock friends who represented the epitome of 1-800-SuperNerd or 1-800-Need-a-date.
Which got me thinking...
As a culture, the technology changes but the path is the same. We are always searching for that dynamic duo of ubiquity and simplicity.
Once the web browser was a thing, we needed a simple way to point it at what we wanted. And thus, we needed a simple way to tell others how to get to us.
WWWDotCom was and is way more compelling than AOL keywords or ugh - directions (go to google search for cats, I'm the third one down). It's so compelling that even as the triple dub has fallen out of fashion, people of a certain age still type it and longtime web denizens still have to buy the .com domain and redirect to what they'd prefer you bookmark in your pinboard or what not.
Cf. the place you land when you visit www.daringfireball.com
I don't think the hashtag has supplanted WWWDotCom and I don't think Facebook pages will either because while everyone has a browser (even on the same device they can dial 1-800 numbers) nobody wants to type a prefix as long as Pages require or google a hashtag when they want a piece of specific content.
So I wonder what's next and laugh a little at the false assumptions future web citizens will make about the 19th century while visiting 1800flowers.com.