2010-10-26T18:27:05+01:00

Killing the spelling

Once I listened as my favourite college Liz called with a doctor (yes we have an open-space) and repeated her name for the 5th time to the phone, I thought to my self, this is really a pain. I'm also hearing our receptionist Timea, from time to time, trying to say clearly the company email addresses over the phone. The hostname is short but some people has really long names like Markus - mhohlagschwandtner@mms.ag. I wouldn't want to spell it out too often...

So what can be done about it? What's easy to pass over the phone? Numbers! There are just 10 types of them, can be clearly pronounced and hard to mistake. What if there will be a web service where one can paste a complex text and have it stored on a pure numeric URL? (besides the top-level-domain-name as there is no numeric one in the world)

The task sounded like a challenge and not so difficult to do in my spare time, so I've created 31415.eu. Here's an example - http://31415.eu/59676716. It's valid for 3 months from now on, that is why so many numbers. The shorter the period, the less numbers it will have. (ex. 0-99 for 15min expiration) Still it's easier to tell 13 numbers (if the page is known to the other person then just 8), then to spell out the information that I've pasted there.

What do you think about it?