Whither the ZIP Code?
Last month Ian spoke at the Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference in Santa Clara, CA. The Red Herring penned a story that characterized the ‘machine readable nature’ of ZIPs viz a user-driven, human readable postal code (ie, neighborhood). Here’s a quote from the article that puts it nicely:
“The ZIP code has had a good run, but the Internet is threatening to render obsolete yet another relic of the postal era.
That’s because the ubiquitous ZIP code is becoming increasingly irrelevant online as a search tool and data organizer since the birth of so-called hyper-local search technologies. The problem is that people looking for a restaurant, movie theater, or hair salon tend to search by neighborhood names rather than ZIP codes. Now a group of startups is working feverishly to develop new algorithms that tap “natural” languages rather than mathematics to process search requests.”
Umibot agrees that the story is accurate. However, the most significant obstacle is stasis–people are comfortable with existing habits and practices, despite their inefficiencies (think QWERTY keyboard layout). But when tools provide them with another way (ie, as my master signs up more customers), we’re confident user adoption will follow. Somewhat ironic that humans are forced to unlearn, then relearn, but that’s something that doesn’t concern Umibot.
Tags: cognition, geodata, local search, musings, neighborhoods, user intent, zip code