How to design an universal address

At this point let us devote a short time to analyze the different kinds of addresses that people are using now. Think about the following mental experiment. Choose a big group of average people and ask them to write down their own postal address, several telephone numbers and email adresses. Then ask them also to write the ones of some close relatives. Of course, no help is allowed from agendas and similar things. What do you think will the outcome be? You would expect that people succeeded in remembering their own postal address and some of them were also able to write the addresses of their close relatives. But surely many of them will fail in providing their own telephone numbers, not to speak about the numbers of others. However, all will be able to tell their email address and many would also be able to give as much as ten or fifteen address of others. The reason is quite clear: the email address format was the most cleverly designed because it is logical and quite related to the person that chooses it. If my name is Alejandro and i work at acme, then it would be quite easy for you to remember my mail address alejandro@acme.com. This is a very important lesson we have to remember.

Suppose you were allowed to choose a single address for all communications and throw away the whole bunch of telephone numbers, postal data and so on. How would you like this address to be? Our former mental experiment points to a very good candidate: email address. But somebody should ask why not allow everybody to choose a particular nick, for example little_john_edwards. This might be a suitable solution but it has two important drawbacks:

1. Many people would choose the same nicks and only the fastest would be able to choose easy and meaninful ones. We would finish up having nicks such us mike_smith_1973_17a which at the end everybody find disgusting.
2. It would require some kind of centralized or hierarchical database to relate nicks with the important information of which they have to be keys. Somebody could provide this kind of databases, but we must admit that the infraestructure required so that anybody can start using universal addresses now does not exist and it will require time to build up.
3. There would be no way to hide some of your data from some people while letting other access it. For a suitable solution, you must have the power to let different people access diferent pieces of your information.

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