I don't like any solution that means the user personally has to deal with IPs. The abstraction away from IP's to names is a brilliant feature with all kinds of

I don't like any solution that means the user personally has to deal with IPs. The abstraction away from IP's to names is a brilliant feature with all kinds of benefits, and one other areas should be looking at. I even recently proposed a quick hack for the phone system: http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2012/07/phone-numbers-in-dns/ http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2012/07/phone-numbers-in-dns/ :-) Also just wanted to point out that your solution 1 needs to incorporate the use case that people want to look at local services away from their local areas at times: to take just one example, thousands of theatre people are about to descend on Edinburgh, UK, for the Festival from all over the world, and I'm sure they have checked out the local area online first. Don't know what the solution is, but then I'm not really convinced there is a problem with this ...