Your Home, Your URL
Street addresses make great URLs:
- 289convent.com
- 224wellington.com
- 437madison.com
None of those are taken, yet they’re all addreses I’ve been affiliated with somehow over the years. (Actually, the last one is registered, but it’s for sale.) If the domain is registered, or there are multiple “25 Main St.” addresses, adding the city or zip code or something similar can easily still make a unique address.
Imagine the possibilities:
Your Home
- You can have a great domain name for your family, or when you’re selling (in which case it’d be a lot easier to remember than some meaningless code provided by a realtor). Might even be a nice bonus to transfer keys and access to the URL to a new owner.
An Apartment Building or Complex
- What a great way to extend social media to a local level:
- Posting important notices, like “Water will be shut off on June 23, 2010, from 1 to 3PM” or “let’s have a stoop-sale Saturday!”
- Online rent payment tools and records
- The creation of local product/service exchanges, like “does anyone need a slightly-used ironing board?” or “can someone help me replace my ceiling lightbulbs?”
- A directory of relevant and emergency contacts, such as superintendent, manager, “in case of water leak please contact…”, etc.
- A forum and links for building issues
- Personal pages of links to Facebook pages for the more social neighbor
- A way to anonymously complain about neighbors, like “the people in apartment #3b played music loudly at 3am last night”. Wow, I’d love THAT feature.
A Brick-and-Mortar Business
- This is another way to cement your “location, location, location” in the minds of customers (which may help boost that whole “location, location, location” idea). And if a business shares a building with other businesses, a variation on the apartment model described above could help increase inter-business cooperation. For example:
- Joining forces to make one retailer’s one-day sale a building-wide one-day sale
- Sharing resources such as construction contractors or web site developers
I realize developing any of these kinds of sites out-of-the-box (fresh-from-the-download?) would take some setup work, require maintenance, and there could be security issue. However I believe it can also save time in the long run, increase human social interaction and/or business, and extend the digital domain into more useful areas. As for security, buildings already share keys with all tenants, so maybe sharing a URL isn’t that big of a stretch.
Tools such as Drupal and Joomla! would be perfect for this if starting from scratch, but even a Facebook page might be a good start.
Like this idea?
It’s yours.
I’ll make more.
But what of apartment dwellers? Would the the 9a’s and 11 1/2 rear cause havoc with the shorten url people
If the apartment number was part of the address or domain, maybe, or better yet, just aim to make it clean (and memorable).
Otherwise it could be just “michael@123mainst.com” or a similar pretty, url-shortener-friendly version.