Giving Everyone in the World an Address

Discussion of the company's own website from three months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198

Coming from a country with a working, comprehensive, addressing system, I never understood how special this was until I started extensively traveling. It's kind of mind-boggling how unique of an invention addresses are and yet how simple they are.

It requires only two things

- give an identifier to each road, numbers are perfectly fine (the scheme isn't even all that important)

- each property plot along a given road gets an incrementing number, plots with multiple housing units are given some kind of subdivider (Apartment, Unit, etc.). This works best with oddly numbered properties on one side and evenly numbered properties on the other.

So long as you use unique identifiers, you don't even need states, counties, zip codes or other administrative districts -- though this makes things easier -- all you need to know if the block of property numbers the address lives in.

An alternate approach is to simply subdivide a territory into smaller and smaller zones until you get to a small enough spot on the planet that you've uniquely identified a plot of land or a building or whatever. I believe Korean addresses used to use something like this but are slowly moving on to a mixed mode system like the U.S. uses (subdivide areas, then use street names and numbers).

It's also seems absolutely insane that the concept of an address, or parts of an address can be some kind of Intellectual Property that a company holds some kind of right to. My understanding is that this used to be a significant problem with addressing in the U.K. and remains one in Ireland. The last time I visited Ireland, outside of the cities, addresses were give to us as Lat,Long coordinates! Absolute insanity.

I remember trying to send a package to a friend in rural England once, the address was something like "The Yellow Home behind the Red Barn, Essex, U.K.". It took 8 weeks to arrive, I have no idea how much of that was spent by the Royal Mail matching color swatches and building combinations.

It's an interesting notion that we couple postal service to addresses. In some places, like Dubai, they are decoupled and the post only makes its way to a P.O. Box, not to a residence -- which of course have no address, and end up with descriptions like "Building ABC Behind the Market, off of the Second Exit, 2 Lefts and a Right after entry" which is necessary for non-government postal services like Fedex. Oddly, this system makes a kind of sense in the Internet age, unless you actually have to get somewhere.

In some countries, local landmarks and these sorts of quasi-turn-by-turn directions-as-addresses are the norm. Oddly, they often persist long after what they describe is gone. "The Red House behind the Temple" might be somebody's address, but the Temple fell during an Earthquake 20 years before and the house is no longer Red. The claim is that the local postman has enough local knowledge to make this work, but there's so many obvious failure modes to make this sort of "system" seem absurd.

If you look back long enough, the U.S. didn't always have a useful system. Old Revolutionary War era advertisements look like the kinds of semi-useless addresses you see elsewhere. Addresses definitely appears to be product of cities, but it's useful when it's used on a national scheme. It's so simple and so absurdly effective, it's always seemed bizarre to me that it's just not universal.

This proposal is interesting, but ultimately a bad idea. Correct addressing encodes both a unique location and navigation way points.

Take a U.S. address:

1234 Main St. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Beverly Hills, CA is honestly not necessary, but does make it human readable, 90210 tells you this location is out west and the post office has a map that subdivides it even more to a specific delivery zone.

There's hopefully only one Main St. in that zip code, and the building is on the 1200 block of that street on the even side. When you arrive there, it should have "1234" on the building and the street signs should tell you that you are on the correct street.

A better proposal is perhaps to use a subdividing system. The world is split into N "squares" and each of those is split into N "squares" and each of those into N and so on until you're at a fine resolution. A simple map lookup for "Fred-Berry-Fred-Cow" would get you to within a few meters of wherever. The military uses versions of such a system (MGRS, UTM, etc.) and without electronic aids you can pretty quickly find pretty much any place on the planet within a few moments.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/pages-past/ben-franklins-pennsyl...

How about retrofitting DNS to do this? Encode a persons GPS coordinates in a TXT record. Now instead of writing my address on an envelope, I write me.example.com. The mailman/post office can then look up someone's coordinates via a DNS query. The benefit of this is that when I move, I can simply update my DNS entry. I could either host my own address or 3rd party could. Local government could grid up their own regions and assign address to fixed locations. You could choose to CNAME your address to the government allocated address or use the government issued one for the plot.

> it was most likely the addressees choice

That's good to know. I believe there was a post code (this exchange happened about 10 years ago). I recall there's been several interesting exchanges over rights access to the postal code locations in the U.K. as internet mapping started to become more prevalent. I think this finally changes ~2009/2010? At least it finally happened, but I cannot fathom the thought process that would have made a campaign necessary to force the release of basic location data.

There is already a LOC Resource Record type defined by RFC 1876[1] that can be used to represent location data.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1876