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Chinese Number Websites
- ytch 13y agoWhen talking about QQ, does anyone remember ICQ? QQ uses number as ID mainly because it's a knockoff from ICQ at beginning
- tobinfricke 13y agoICQ is kind of an example of the numbers-website phenomenon in English: the letters themselves are meaningless, but when pronounced sound like "I seek you" (compare to the Alibaba example in the linked article).
- darklajid 13y agoI still know my ICQ number by heart, but cannot remember my own land line and only recently managed to memorize my (company) mobile number.
- Joyfield 13y agoSame here. 817598
- cynix 13y agoIt was even called OICQ (OpenICQ) when they first started, even though there was nothing "open" about their service.
- myf 13y agoit also uses a penguin as the mascot...
- gbraad 13y ago"Why do Chinese websites use numbers in their domain names?" http://dashan.com/blog/culture/why-do-chinese-websites-use-numbers-in-their-domain-names/ http://dashan.com/blog/culture/why-do-chinese-websites-use-n...
- yebyen 13y agoDon't understand why you've been downvoted This article even mentions Hindi-Arabic numbers, which is an interesting thing to me as a student of the Arabic language My teacher explained to us once, the numbers we use are called Arabic numbers, but Arabs don't actually use them... they use Hindi numbers. ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠ Which is twice as funny as Arabs not actually using Arabic numbers, because (he said) especially Muslims are very prejudiced against Hindi people and Hindu religion. He would say things like "silly Hindu", then have a big belly laugh and get back to serious classwork.
- opendomain 13y agoOne of the more popular OpenDomains I have is 17m.com - auite a few people ask to use it for a group buying site. This article helped me see the importance of numbers, but when I looked it up on google translate but could not understand what '17m' was supposed to mean. Can anyone tell me?
- bebc 13y ago"17" prounces yiqi, in Chinese it sounds like "一起", "together", "m" prounce like “买" "buy", so "17m" means "shopping together".
- jamesli 13y agoBecause digit numbers are not foreign to Chinese. As simple as that. The majority of Chinese don't speak any western languages. A domain name of letters is no different from a random combination of letters to them, even if the name is composed of real words in English, Spanish, or French, etc. They are completely foreign. While a combination of digits is not, like phone numbers, zip codes, bus numbers, train numbers, etc. They deal with them everyday. My parents don't speak any other languages other than Mandarin. [To be accurate, my mother spoke some Mongolian, and my father spoke a little Russian, when they were young. But they couldn't speak any of them now.] They have no problem in recognize and pronounce the 26 letter in English. After I have been living in American for so many years, they still can't spell my home address. They remember my phone numbers and my house numbers, though, but not the street names. Think about it. It is amazing. Because I find it is much easier to remember street names than phone numbers. Phone numbers are simply a random combination of digits, except the area code.
- arrrg 13y agoThat makes complete sense. The number system is quite universal and global, writing systems are not, or at least not to the same extent. I would be lost if you asked me to type in a Cyrillic URL (and Cyrillic is quite similar to Latin script, all things considered!), I wouldn’t even know where to start if you asked me to type something from an even more different writing system in. I suppose English is on its way to gain some of the same universality as Arabic numbers, but it’s still a far way away from that.
- rdtsc 13y agoThank you for sharing that, that makes complete sense. My parents also don't speak English. They speak Romanian, so when they see English they read it as if it is Romanian. Like if they see "house" they might pronounce it as "hoe-oo-seh" (just say every letter, and pronounce with as if it is from a Romanian alphabet). I guess I never thought what it might be like if it was a completely unpronounceable alphabet like Greek for example. At that point a string of digits would work better.
- ddoolin 13y agoThis phenomenon is also visible in Korea, except the way to navigate to popular websites is to search Naver, Daum, or Google with the Korean name of the website and then hit the top link. I found it very strange at first but completely understandable given they typical just know the name of websites via their names translated into Korean letters. e.g. Facebook -> 페이스북 (페북); Pretty interesting.
- jimbobimbo 13y agoI actually created an email alias for myself that looks like 5553423123@hotmail.com (555-... is my real phone number). My logic is: whenever I need to say my email over the phone, it's much less error prone to tell a string of numbers followed by the common domain name than spelling my real (custom) name and domain name.
- vorg 13y agoThe phone has more to do in other ways with why digit urls in China than the article mentions. Most Chinese internet users who are visiting websites use their phone, and the 12-key digits pad is a lot easily to type into than the 30-key letters pad. The people who use netbars or home computers in China are playing online games, not visiting websites.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoSo...DNS was a waste of time - we could have stuck with just typing in the dotted quads :-)
- Kiro 13y agoGreat article but I don't understand why the American friend refused to communicate with people whose email addresses consist of numbers.
- gk1 13y agoUntil reading this article I assumed every 163.com email I saw was just using one of those temporary email inboxes, for fear of spam emails or due to privacy concerns. I, too, dismissed those emails and considered them as useless as seeing blah@blah.com. Now I know they're actual accounts, just based in China.
- abrowne 13y agoHope she doesn't want to text anyone.
- epo 13y agoThese days if you have them in your address book you can just start typing their name and then pick from a list.
- abrowne 13y agoTrue, but most so do most email clients, and this still would be breaking her rule of "refus[ing] to communicate with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers".
- walshemj 13y agowell I can remember cix using numeric id's and Prestel (an early viewdata system) used to use nine! digit numbers for your mailbox id eg 018222211
- manifesto 13y agoOne reason why Chinese have less difficulty remembering and using these numbers than the western fellows might be the difference in pronunciation. In Chinese, all single digit number has the same structure: a consonant plus a vowel. For example, 7, in Chinese is pronounced as [ch-i:], while in English is pronounced as [ˈsɛvən]. Also, every digit takes the same time to pronounce. For example, a string "123456" is [yi:, er, san, si:, wu, liu]. That, in my experience, makes a long string of number easier to read out. And easier to read out means easier to memorize. A side node: In China every kids in their elementary school if not kindergarten can recite the "table of multiplication". That is, they can remember the answer from 1 * 1 to 9 * 9. I doubt how many westerners can do so, due to the language difference. Edit: The asterisk symbol is driving me nut.
- w1ntermute 13y agoMemorizing the times tables (up to 12·12) is standard in American schools.
- raverbashing 13y agoYup (but sometimes up to 10x10) Of course, we would only need to memorize (10-x) items for the x table, except 1x anything, which is trivial so, know 2x2, 2x3, 2x4, 2x5, 2x6, 2x7, 2x8, 2x9 from 3, you can begin at 3x3, then 3x4, etc to be more advanced you only need to know up to 5, and do the rest with math... 97? easy peasy. (5+4)(5+3) = 55 + 53 + 45 + 43 -> 25 + 15 + 20 + 12 = 72 (there are other tricks you can do)
- w1ntermute 13y agoWell, that's an example of the time-memory tradeoff, right? It takes a lot longer to calculate 9·7 that way than it does if you've just memorized it. The real question is where to draw the line with respect to diminishing returns on memorizing products for larger and larger numbers.
- vorg 13y ago
- w1ntermute 13y agoBut why is this phenomenon restricted to China? I haven't observed it with, for example, Japanese sites, even though they too use a non-Latin alphabet.
- manifesto 13y agoFor the phenomenon of number string in email address, that's because they don't use QQ, an IM service from Tencent. For other numbers in domains, I think it's because number in Chinese are easier to pronounce, and easier to remember.
- wodenokoto 13y agoThere's a few things things that contribute to this: Market powers in Japan chose early on to advertise their websites not through URLs but through search keywords. They will literally ask you in advertisement to enter certain phrases in a search engine to let you find their web property. Japanese internet usage is traditionally based around cellphones, which traditionally were centered around portals. This is changing with smartphones. Japanese numbers don't lend themselves as easily as Chinese to these double meanings. Japanese words are quite long compared to Chinese ('wo', is Chinese for 'I', the Japanese equivelant is 'watashi')
- w1ntermute 13y ago> They will literally ask you in advertisement to enter certain phrases in a search engine to let you find their web property. I have noticed this on occasion, and found it very surprising. They're basically handing control over access to their site to the search engine. That seems like a very bad idea.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoNo different to "Facebook.com/BigBrand" if that's where most of your audience spends their time online fighting it might be foolish
- 13y ago
- autarch 13y ago1688 is not prounounced as "yoh-leeyoh-ba-ba". The 1 is pronounced as "ee". This actually makes it closer to Alibaba.
- FooBarWidget 13y ago1 is pronounced "yoh"/"yao" in the context of phone numbers.
- danoprey 13y agoWhich I find very frustrating as it sounds much more similar to liu (6) when pronounced in my crappy Chinese than yi does.
- ezl 13y agochinese speakers like yao often because it sounds LESS like other numbers and is harder to miss. yao1 (1) and liu4 (6) should be pretty distinct. but if the way you pronounce them is similar for whatever reason, you can always use yi and chinese listeners won't flinch. in fact, taiwanese americans will be confused by yao, but zero people will be confused by yi so it's arguably better to use that if you don't know the background of your counterparty.
- danoprey 13y agoPerhaps I'm mishearing but it sounds to me more like they are pronouncing it "yo" (English) or "you" (Chinese) here in Beijing, which does sound more like 6. yi/qi are slightly similar but I never have the same issue. I've given up on trying to be correct and use yi most of the time.
- dmoy 13y agoIt's the tone. yao sounds very different from liu because of the tone. yi also sounds different from liu because of the tone. yi does not sound very different from qi, and yi is hard to disambiguate with multiple yi in a row. you use yao because it's easier to understand qi yao yao yao ba san than qi yi yi yi ba san It's mostly the qi yi yi / yi yi yi that gets hard to disambiguate. What is likely happening is that you don't yet have the ear for the tone.
- yzhou 13y agothe point of using number in the domain is, a lot of Chinese people don't know letters, they don't know English words and they can't get "PinYin"(using letters to represent Chinese words) right. How do you make these people type urls in the browser? well, luckily, they all know numbers!
- khuey 13y agoAre there really computer-literate Mandarin speakers in China who don't know pinyin? How do they input text? The only serious non-pinyin IMEs I'm aware of are the bopomofo ones for traditional characters in Taiwan.
- yzhou 13y agomany older people like my dad, don't know pinyin well. he doesn't input texts, but he browses web sites. He uses a default home pages full of links to start exploring the web.
- gurkendoktor 13y agoI've regularly seen people use the handwriting IME in China. They were probably only post-PC computer literate, though :)
- vorg 13y agoMandarin speakers in some parts of China speak their Mandarin differently, so can't remember the exact pinyin. E.g. around Wuhan people can't remember whether a word ends with -ang or -an, similarly with -eng and -en. As a foreigner, I can't remember nu and nv, similarly lu and lv. Beijingers have trouble with -r endings.
- dperfect 13y agoI'm surprised there's no mention here of punycode and IDNs. Is there just not enough widespread support for IDNs (the article mentions a need for plugins, but I thought most browsers already support IDNs), or are numbers really that much easier to type and remember than short, meaningful domains in native characters? As I understand, punycode is translated by the browser to a standard ASCII string, so there's no need for special support in the DNS system or other infrastructure other than a simple translation in the browser's URL handling. Seems like a pretty straightforward/simple solution.
- alcari 13y ago> there's no need for special support in the DNS system or other infrastructure Many TLDs disallow registrations containing punycode. Take a look at Wikipedia's (incomplete?) list of those that do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cctlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cctlds
- dperfect 13y agoInteresting. From what I can tell though, the lack of support from those TLDs seems to be deliberate rather than due to any technical challenge (the domain you register ends up just looking like standard alphanumeric ASCII with some dashes). I may be wrong, but it probably requires more effort for a TLD to disallow IDNs as they'd have to implement a test to try and detect a punycode string within the ASCII. The one technical challenge I suppose could be a concern would be optionally implementing some sort of test to detect domain registration attempts that use similar-looking characters to those in existing legitimate domains (e.g., registrations from scammers attempting phishing attacks with domains that look similar to other domains but use different extended characters). Still, it feels like the lack of support from these TLDs is more a matter of policy than a technical challenge.
- vikramrajkumar 13y ago> The one technical challenge I suppose could be a concern would be optionally implementing some sort of test to detect domain registration attempts that use similar-looking characters to those in existing legitimate domains (e.g., registrations from scammers attempting phishing attacks with domains that look similar to other domains but use different extended characters). This is called the IDN homograph attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack).
- mirkules 13y ago"Hotmail.com might as well be Cyrillic". This is not a good comparison because Cyrillic (at least, the slavic version) has almost a one-to-one relation to its latin counterparts. Russian Cyrillic is a little more complex, with letter modifiers (like "soft sign" and "hard sign") while in other flavors like Serbian Cyrillics, those characteristics were built into the language. Hotmail.com directly transliterated to Cyrillic would be: хотмаил.цом (h=х, i=и, l=л, c=ц and the rest are the same).
- zht 13y agoSo how many Americans would be able to type хотмаил.цом?
- mirkules 13y agoThe point is that there is a direct transliteration available between cyrillic and latin, and it's also not so culture-dependent as 617.cn is. You could trivially automate that process too.
- couchand 13y agoI thought the point was that it would be tough for an English speaker to find and enter the characters if they were Cyrillic. The transliteration only has to be done once when registering domains, so it doesn't seem like much of a burden.
- briandh 13y ago> In 2012, the United States refused to sign an international telecommunications treaty, supported by both Russia and China, that would shift the Internet away from its current U.S.-centric form of governance. As the linked article expounds upon, this statement is strictly true but does not give a very good picture of the situation. It was rejected on free speech grounds, and not just by the US.
- funkyy 13y agoGreat article - I bookmarked it - when our startup will go online I will buy associated number domain and redirect all Chinese traffic to it. I think that's a great idea!
- cpeterso 13y agoWouldn't numbers also be faster to enter because you wouldn't need an IME?
- lotsofmangos 13y agoThe comment about country codes at the end is interesting. Presumably it should be something like .zg
- tn13 13y agoI often see many rants on HN about US government and how it is becoming a police state. However I think the fact that internet is US centric is better than the internet where countries like Russia or China have have greater say.