Changing Your Address

dmnd · on May 6, 2008

I thought of this last time I moved. It took hours to change my address in all the various organisations that need to know it.

Obviously the problem with getting it off the ground. Who is big enough to start this off, short of the Government?

nertzy · on May 7, 2008

One of my professors (Allen Downey at Olin College) loved to show his idea of system like this for postal addresses. The idea was that you would be issued a fake address that is a key within a database pointing to your current address as a value.

So my address might be: 1532 Elm St. Faketown, PL

Since PL is not a state, the postal service would know to look up the current address in this database, and would forward mail appropriately. They could then slap a label on it with the real address so that the postal carriers don't go crazy.

delano · on May 6, 2008

It's like an OpenID for street addresses. Couldn't this easily be a feature for Clickpass?

TrevorJ · on May 6, 2008

As long as the URL you use isn't harder to type in than your address, this has merit. Conversely, I remember my address a lot easier than I remember a URL

ibsulon · on May 6, 2008

http://myaddress.us/trevorj ?

(Link -> parked godaddy domain)