Chris Heathcote talks about the need for our URLs to be more human-friendly as opposed to the normal CMS style ones we see today. By thinking about the URL, we can offer users easier ways to find data or services.
For example, on our start page, it would be awesome if you could find the weather for Monrovia by going to this URL: http://my.earthlink.net/weather/91016 or seeing the latest value of the EarthLink stock by going to: http://my.earthlink.net/stocks/ELNK. With a little work, either of these can be done and maybe you can add /rss to the end of each and get back a RSS feed. The possibilities are endless once you start returning useful data with the URL.
The larger question though is whether users will think to explore your site this way or if they will continue to only go where links take them. It's tough to say but the more sites which have easy-to-hack URLs, the better chances everyday people will start doing it.
Technorati Tags:
humancenteredurls