When recently asked, “have you ever tired to enter a long Web address without using a standard QWERTY keyboard” I was reminded of my visit this summer to the City of Light. Paris is many things, but a high-tech metropolis it is not. The cybercafés were crowded and very few had “western” QWERTY keyboards. So I was reduced to trying to use my Blackberry and international mobile phone to check e-mail, and more importantly check the status of my eBay auctions! Well, my holiday to Europe was almost ruined when I lost one of the auctions because I couldn’t easily check my e-mail. Logging into eBay’s short Web site URL was easy enough, but other sites are a pain to type on mobile devices.
So over here at MobileCrunch we were was pleased to hear about Paged Mobile, or pa.gd as the company is also calling itself. Basically pa.gd is providing a solution to create shorter Web addresses, which are essentially similar to nicknames for Web sties. This service provides a short way to enter thousands of Web addresses much like online shortcuts. More than 11,000 sites to date are available and this works with YubNub commands. The site is currently in beta, so it will be one to watch and see how this evolves.
While it could mean further degradation of the English language, and reduce the common lexicon to more anagrams, anything that makes mobile Web surfer is worth it!