Why do billions of people have to type "www." before the domain name of every site they access? Isn't it obvious that, if they're typing the address into a web browser, that they're interested in the World Wide Web service (and not, for example, FTP or SSH)? These 4 characters may be trivial to each individual Web user during the course of a day, but if we pool together the entire Web-using population of the world, and measure the total person-hours lost in entering 4 extra keystrokes for each site they visit, the number would be mind-boggling.
The history
In the past, there were individual servers for each service, and DNS-based load-balancing and other advanced techniques were not invented yet, so it was prudent to have one server dedicated to serving WWW requests. It gained the obvious subdomain of "www". But here we are, in 2007, still shackled to having to type these extra characters every time.
What you can do to help fix the problem
If you're reading this, and own a website (or have considerable influence over such things), please try and get your website to respond to requests addressed to yourdomain.com in addition to www.yourdomain.com. It is an easy DNS-level and web-server level configuration change that your sysadmin can perform within minutes, and none of your application code needs to be changed. In addition, you can help communicate the change to your users by removing the "www." from all hyperlinks, marketing and promotional material, and wherever else the "www." prefix used to appear.
Save the world ...
... from these shady characters! ;)
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