Ah, URL, we hardly knew ye. As has been widely reported and almost uniformly lamented, the ICANN has decided to “relax” naming rules for website addresses, ditching the nearly universal .com, .org and .net for things like .dot, .awesomenewending, and .fart.

Shouldn’t we celebrate this? Shouldn’t we feel emancipated from the shackles of URL arcana, free to define a website address that really describes who we are, instead of some third-level compromise?

Well, yes. And no. As constricting as the old system was, it gave a familiar structure to website addresses, so much in fact that it had nearly reached social awareness saturation. URLs were expected to end in .com, so much in fact that if you simply type in “nike” into any modern browser it will take you to www.nike.com.

The new rules obliterate this familiarity, and add a second level of complexity to an already ridiculously technical way of reaching a site. Instead of just having to remember djdougpound, for example, since the .com is inferred, you’ll now have to remember dougpound.dj, or somesuch nonsense.

All of this is really moot, which brings me to the title of this post. The URL was already on its way to obsolescence. The rise of all-powerful Search has made remembering any web address a non-issue, and as the technologies become more intelligent, no one is going to care if your website is named awesome.com or awesome.brah. They’re just going to find it in Google anyway.

That said, I’m still going to go out and register ICANN.hascheeseburger.

So, D-Train, Rick Webb and I were talking about namin’ babies this weekend at a bar, whilst wearing fake moustaches (don’t ask). Well, there’s were fake, anyways. And D was saying how she is almost impossible to Google, because her name is unique (i.e. kinda made up – love you!). But this leads to unique problems: we discovered a few months ago that if you simply Googled her first name, the third link was to her secret blog – not great for a public school teacher.

So Rick was saying how he used to think it would be awesome to name his child something unique so they were eminently searchable in the future, but now thinks it’s better to be stealthy: Name your child something so common that it’s nearly impossible to separate the signal from the noise. You simply vanish into a sea of digital homogeny. This is something I ran into when an ex-girlfriend started dating some guy who shared a name with an NFL quarterback (luckily he was NOT the quarterback) and it’s also something our own Reneé Zellweger can attest to.

So I just went to Google and searched for something, then switched over to Google News to look for recent articles on the topic I was searching, when I noticed something weird. Observe:

They’ve switched up the G in their favicon! It’s jarring, isn’t it? What strikes me as particularly interesting, though, isn’t that it’s a different G, but that’s it’s a different part of the same logo and yet it’s still hardly recognizable. I’m so used to seeing the familiar blue capital G with the red, green and blue lines around it that a lowercase g in a smooth white box is like an alien life form.

It makes me realize how much we underestimate the importance of the favicon as a component of brand identity. It’s surprising how much of a difference a 16×16 image can make, but it does. Most major sites have long since picked up on its importance, though I’m sure many more still lag behind (I can’t think of any off the top of my head… can you?). Still others occasionally just plain get it wrong, I think, as Yahoo! recently did when they stripped Upcoming of its unique favicon in favor of the big red Y!. They certainly wouldn’t do the same to Flickr, so why Upcoming?

Anyway, I’ll try to keep from rambling too much on the subject, but the Google thing really caught me off guard. Looking at the big picture, though (the 64×64 picture? heh), it’s a much better icon for them, and even if the blogosphere pans it (which seems soft of inevitable to me for some reason), I think in the long run it’ll be seen as a good move on their part. Of course, it is a tad strange that their main site seems to have kept the old icon, at least for now. Maybe this is a soft launch of Google Favicon 2.0?

Of all the Microsoft-Yahoo press this was my favorite quote, from the Washington Post:

“Microsoft may be using the crocodile strategy,” said Todd Dagres, general partner at Spark Capital in Boston. “Rather than try to eat its prey while it’s warm and tough, it’s dragging it down to the bottom of the river, sticking it under a rock and eating it later.”

I have a few good friends who work at Yahoo and this is EXACTLY how they feel.

WTF is going on over there?

I remember when Yahoo! had their huge IPO, their big out-of-home spectacular on Houston street in NYC and, best of all, their blatant and over the top use of an exclamation point!

I hope someone over their somewhere figures this all out before one of the great Internet brands is gone forever.

Last night, Google was kind enough to invite the Barbarians to the New York launch party for the iGoogle Artist Themes. We’ve been working with Google on the artist themes for a few months now, and we were excited to see them go out into the wild and spread the creative love.

But boy, we sure weren’t ready for the high class event! What a good time. We’ve seen our share of tech gatherings, of course (we hit an awesome Nokia/Webby Award event on Tuesday at the Nokia Flagship store), and ad events (we also hit the ANDY Awards on wednesday), but this was an ART event. We’ve not seen this kind of art star power in one room since the opening of the New Museum last fall.

The highlight of the night was a panel, moderated by Marissa Mayer, featuring… wait for it… Mark Ecko, Anne Geddes, Bob Mankoff (of the New Yorker, whose theme we produced, among others), Jeff Koons and Michael Graves.

Jeff Koons and Michael Graves? Holy heck. It’s not every day you accidentally stumble into a room featuring two of your high school idols. Also spotted: Diane von Furstenberg, and a personal hero of the Barbarian Group, of course, John Maeda. I was too chicken to go say high to him, even though I was recently on a panel with one of his former students and now a prof at the Media Lab, David Small.

Anyway, awesome night. We’re proud to have worked on this project with Google, and we’re ever thankful to Maya Moufarek, Michaela Prescott, and Andy Berndt for the gig.