Eircode - its implemetation (merged)

plodder · 15-02-2016 6:54pm

marmurr1916 wrote: »

BT is a particularly poor example - BT stands for Belfast. I'm not sure what meaningful local connection someone in Co. Fermanagh is supposed to derive from that.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I don't think it requires any great stretch of the imagination to understand that Belfast is the main city in NI and the BT postcode refers to all of NI.

plodder · 15-02-2016 7:05pm

astrofool wrote: »

My cousins live in the TD area, don't have a clue what it means, has no meaning whatsoever to me, yet it's easy for me to remember and great for navigating via GPS when I visit, can't wait to start doing the same over here with GPS devices.

Easy to remember because it follows a logical structure

So, even though TD doesn't have to mean anything specific, if you live there, you would get to know it and you'd probably recognise roughly where a postcode is situated just by looking at the first three letters of it. I think we're going off topic slightly though

ukoda · 15-02-2016 7:25pm

plodder wrote: »

So, even though TD doesn't have to mean anything specific, if you live there, you would get to know it and you'd probably recognise roughly where a postcode is situated just by looking at the first three letters of it. I think we're going off topic slightly though

would that be the same way T12 doesn't have to mean anything, but you'd get to know its Cork just by looking at it?

Make up your minds guys, you claim it should be meaningful in one breath and that it doesn't have to mean anything in the next breath. And yes this is off topic.

plodder · 15-02-2016 8:41pm

ukoda wrote: »

would that be the same way T12 doesn't have to mean anything, but you'd get to know its Cork just by looking at it?

Make up your minds guys, you claim it should be meaningful in one breath and that it doesn't have to mean anything in the next breath. And yes this is off topic.

CK or C would be better obviously, but it's true that people who live in T12 will get to know the area it refers to. Some of the other mega and oddly shaped ones will be harder to gain that level of recognition though. And unfortunately, it just stops at that level given the remaining random part.

Interesting to look at the areas around Cork city while we're talking about it:

T12, T23, T34, T45, T56 and then a number of P areas. All fairly random really.

oscarBravo · 15-02-2016 11:32pm

I just had reason to check, and it looks like about 60% of our customer records include Eircodes.

I was in a customer's house today, and asked them for their Eircode while I was there. They read it off the wee card stuck to the fridge.

Slowly but surely.

marmurr1916 · 16-02-2016 10:50am

plodder wrote: »

We'll have to agree to disagree. I don't think it requires any great stretch of the imagination to understand that Belfast is the main city in NI and the BT postcode refers to all of NI.

In that case we should have DXX routing codes for all of Leinster, CXX routing codes for all of Munster, GXX routing codes for all of Connacht and CNXX (for Cavan!) for the three Ulster counties in the state.

You're not disagreeing with me as such, you're disagreeing with Mountainsandh - his/her proposal was that Eircodes should have two parts. The first part should contain a reference to the county, the second part should contain a reference to the local area. He thinks it'll make them easier to remember if there's a strong local connection and if the characters an Eircode is made up of appears to users to be in some way meaningful (e.g. D for Dublin etc) instead of appearing to users to be a string of random characters which he thinks makes them harder to remember.

My point about DL etc postcodes is that UK postcodes don't necessarily have a strong local connection (BT postcodes being the most obvious example) and, in most cases, may as well be a string of random characters as far as the average person using them is concerned.

Therefore, the criticism that Mountainsandh has made about the characters that make up Eircodes (i.e. that for the average user they appear to be completely random thus making them harder to remember) applies in practice to UK postcodes which are widely used and thus remembered.

The appearance of Eircodes, the fact that in general the characters they use do not lead to any association with a local area, is not an issue for me at all, and, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't make them any harder to remember than UK postcodes, even though the latter supposedly (although not necessarily in practice) have characters with a meaningful connection to a local area.

Memory comes with usage - people remember their phone numbers because they use them frequently even though as far as most people are concerned, the sequence of numbers that make up their phone number is essentially random.

Before anyone comes along to explain how phone numbers aren't random - they're made up of area codes plus exchange codes etc - that's not my point. My point is how they appear to the average person, not how they appear to someone with in-depth knowledge of how phone numbers are formatted.

Likewise with UK postcodes. Posters here may know that they're formatted in a hierarchical manner but I don't think the vast majority of postcode users in the UK either know or care. As far as they're concerned, their postcodes are a string of random characters that they memorise through frequent usage.

And the idea, put forward by Mountainsandh in a previous post, that you could have a postcode design that allows you to ask for directions from someone in a petrol station is just a joke.

Can you imagine asking the person behind the counter in any petrol station in any country directions from there just by giving the postcode of the place you want to get to? It's a crazy notion, no matter what format the postcode might have.

marmurr1916 · 16-02-2016 11:06am

ukoda wrote: »

would that be the same way T12 doesn't have to mean anything, but you'd get to know its Cork just by looking at it?

Make up your minds guys, you claim it should be meaningful in one breath and that it doesn't have to mean anything in the next breath. And yes this is off topic.

I don't see why remembering that T12 means parts of Cork city and environs should be any more difficult than remembering that BT82 means Strabane and its environs.

It's not as if Strabane immediately leaps to mind when a person hears or reads the letters BT, is it?

Does Bridgnorth in Shropshire jump into someone's mind when they hear or read WV15 or WV16?

I'm afraid that some critics of Eircodes are trying to have it both ways.

I don't think discussing the design of Eircodes is off topic when it comes to discussing their implementation.

After all, we're debating whether or not the design of Eircodes has a connection with whether they're remembered or not. If Eircodes are hard to remember it could affect the take-up rate and their subsequent use by state and public bodies and commercially.

Some posters have contended that the design of Eircodes, how the characters in them are formatted, makes them less memorable than they might be if formatted differently, particularly if the letters they contain were also contained in county and local placenames.

The examples of UK postcodes provided show that postcodes can be memorable even when the letters they contain don't have any links to local placenames.

Frequent use of Eircodes and postcodes is what makes them memorable, just as frequent use of phone numbers is what makes them memorable, not anything intrinsic to the design of phone numbers.

Frequent use = more memorable = more likely to be asked for = greater breadth of implementation.

plodder · 16-02-2016 11:31am

marmurr1916 wrote: »

In that case we should have DXX routing codes for all of Leinster, CXX routing codes for all of Munster, GXX routing codes for all of Connacht and CNXX (for Cavan!) for the three Ulster counties in the state.

You're not disagreeing with me as such, you're disagreeing with Mountainsandh - his/her proposal was that Eircodes should have two parts. The first part should contain a reference to the county, the second part should contain a reference to the local area. He thinks it'll make them easier to remember if there's a strong local connection and if the characters an Eircode is made up of appears to users to be in some way meaningful (e.g. D for Dublin etc) instead of appearing to users to be a string of random characters which he thinks makes them harder to remember.

My point about DL etc postcodes is that UK postcodes don't necessarily have a strong local connection (BT postcodes being the most obvious example) and, in most cases, may as well be a string of random characters as far as the average person using them is concerned.

Therefore, the criticism that Mountainsandh has made about the characters that make up Eircodes (i.e. that for the average user they appear to be completely random thus making them harder to remember) applies in practice to UK postcodes which are widely used and thus remembered.

The appearance of Eircodes, the fact that in general the characters they use do not lead to any association with a local area, is not an issue for me at all, and, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't make them any harder to remember than UK postcodes, even though the latter supposedly (although not necessarily in practice) have characters with a meaningful connection to a local area.

Memory comes with usage - people remember their phone numbers because they use them frequently even though as far as most people are concerned, the sequence of numbers that make up their phone number is essentially random.

Before anyone comes along to explain how phone numbers aren't random - they're made up of area codes plus exchange codes etc - that's not my point. My point is how they appear to the average person, not how they appear to someone with in-depth knowledge of how phone numbers are formatted.

Likewise with UK postcodes. Posters here may know that they're formatted in a hierarchical manner but I don't think the vast majority of postcode users in the UK either know or care. As far as they're concerned, their postcodes are a string of random characters that they memorise through frequent usage.

And the idea, put forward by Mountainsandh in a previous post, that you could have a postcode design that allows you to ask for directions from someone in a petrol station is just a joke.

Can you imagine asking the person behind the counter in any petrol station in any country directions from there just by giving the postcode of the place you want to get to? It's a crazy notion, no matter what format the postcode might have.

I think your point has some merit with respect to people remembering their own postcode. Where it falls down is when it comes to remembering or recognising other postcodes. There are different scenarios but the most extreme one is obviously neighbours on the same street.

UK
---
DL11 XP1
DL11 XP1
DL11 XP1

Ireland

T12 XP12
T12 Q9R1
T12 D9P2

You can't seriously suggest that the Eircodes are easier to remember in this situation? Even in other scenarios of addresses on different roads but in the same district the DL11 part will be the same in the UK (DL being structurally equivalent to the T12 in Eircode)

Mountainsandh's point which I agree with is T12 might refer to a part of Cork city, but it would be better if it were C1, or C2 etc and then the next part should refer to an area within C1 or C2 etc. That would be easier to recognise and remember.

marmurr1916 · 16-02-2016 11:38am

plodder wrote: »

CK or C would be better obviously, but it's true that people who live in T12 will get to know the area it refers to. Some of the other mega and oddly shaped ones will be harder to gain that level of recognition though. And unfortunately, it just stops at that level given the remaining random part.

Interesting to look at the areas around Cork city while we're talking about it:

T12, T23, T34, T45, T56 and then a number of P areas. All fairly random really.

Random as opposed to where I live? Shouldn't all Co. Durham addresses have a DH postcode if you're going down the 'link with local placename' road? And if you knew that NW referred to North West London, wouldn't you perhaps assume that NE refers to North East London, rather than Newcastle, parts of Tyneside and some surrounding rural areas? Isn't that fairly random really?

plodder wrote: »

T12, T23, T34, T45, T56 and then a number of P areas. All fairly random really.

Not at all. Look at the TXX routing keys more closely - T12, T23, T34, T45, T56...

Looks like a fairly obvious pattern to me. Apart from that obvious pattern, T is used for areas served by An Post from Cork city.

Then P is used for addresses served by the various post-towns in County Cork.

It's very similar to the way postcode areas are set up here in Co. Durham.

The larger towns of Darlington and Sunderland have their own postcode areas (which include smaller towns, villages and rural areas served from Darlington/Sunderland by Royal Mail) of DL and SR and TS (for Teesside) is used for the conurbation centred on the River Tees including Stockton along with Middlesbrough and Hartlepoool and surrounding areas, extending into parts of Yorkshire too.

DH is only used for parts of Co. Durham - addresses in Co. Durham can have DH postcodes, DL postcodes, SR postcodes, TS postcodes or NE postcodes, depending on how Royal Mail serves them.

As far as the average member of the public is concerned, the division of Co. Durham into these postcode areas seems fairly random.

Just like the division of Cork (city and county) into T and P routing key areas seems fairly random to the average member of the public.

Yet both have an underlying logic which is based on what suits the universal postal service providers.

However, the majority of people don't know and don't care about this underlying logic.

They will remember their postcodes or Eircodes if they use them frequently.

It's of no concern to the average member of the public if a code which appears to be random has an underlying logic which is understood only by some people.

So long as the code is used frequently it will be remembered, just like phone numbers. Therefore the design of Eircodes, how the characters appear, is not a barrier to their implementation.

Sam Russell · 16-02-2016 11:39am

Mod: Can we keep design questions to the other thread. This one is about implementation. When Google announce they have implemented it - that goes here. When Google announce they do not like the structure - that goes there.

BailMeOut · 16-02-2016 11:41am

can we take all the discussions about eircode design to the other thread. This one is supposed to be about Eircode implementation.

marmurr1916 · 16-02-2016 12:19pm

plodder wrote: »

I think your point has some merit with respect to people remembering their own postcode. Where it falls down is when it comes to remembering or recognising other postcodes. There are different scenarios but the most extreme one is obviously neighbours on the same street.

UK
---
DL11 XP1
DL11 XP1
DL11 XP1

Ireland
T12 XP12
T12 Q9R1
T12 D9P2

You can't seriously suggest that the Eircodes are easier to remember in this situation? Even in other scenarios of addresses on different roads but in the same district the DL11 part will be the same in the UK (DL being structurally equivalent to the T12 in Eircode)

Mountainsandh's point which I agree with is T12 might refer to a part of Cork city, but it would be better if it were C1, or C2 etc and then the next part should refer to an area within C1 or C2 etc. That would be easier to recognise and remember.

Why would I need to remember my neighbour's Eircode or their postcode?

Unless I want to use it for some reason, in which case I'll look it up and memorise it or write it down.

plodder wrote: »

There are different scenarios but the most extreme one is obviously neighbours on the same street.

UK
---
DL11 XP1
DL11 XP1
DL11 XP1

Ireland
T12 XP12
T12 Q9R1
T12 D9P2

I wouldn't assume that my neighbour's postcode would be the same because I live on the same street as them. The street I live on has houses numbered 1 to 85. It has different postcodes depending on your house number. You're assuming that every street is short enough to have its own postcode - that's not the case at all. And what happens with all the people who live near the boundaries of a postcode or postcode area? The nearest neighbour of someone who lives in AB30 might live in DD9, while someone who lives in AB39 is going to be at least 50 miles, maybe more, from someone who lives in AB38, while someone who lives in AB54 could have people who live in AB55, AB37 and AB36 as their nearest neighbours. Is it easier to get to IV51 from PH41 or from IV54?

plodder wrote: »

Mountainsandh's point which I agree with is T12 might refer to a part of Cork city, but it would be better if it were C1, or C2 etc and then the next part should refer to an area within C1 or C2 etc. That would be easier to recognise and remember.

The second part of a UK postcode doesn't refer to an area within NE1 or whatever.

No London postcode area starts with L or LN or LD or anything to do with the word London at all. Some start with NW (north-west London) although NE (which one might logically assume stands for north-east London if one didn't know otherwise) is used for Newcastle, Gateshead and many other towns, villages and rural areas surrounding them. Gateshead has its own council but was traditionally in Co. Durham, being south of the River Tyne, the traditional boundary between Co. Durham and the county of Northumberland...

Do the letters NW instantly make you think of London when you hear them? If you didn't know that NW in a postcode referred to part of London would you have guessed that it did? And once you learned that NW referred to north-west London, would you have guessed that NE referred to north-east London if you didn't already know otherwise?

The areas I'm discussing here are not trivial anomalies within the overall UK postcode system - they are either areas of significant population (greater London has over 8.6 million people, the Tyneside conurbation has a population of about 1.2 million people) or huge geographical extent (the IV postcode area is nearly as big as Connacht while BT covers all of Northern Ireland).

I don't see how or why someone living 80+ miles from either Belfast or Inverness should feel any greater local connection with a BTXX or IVXX postcode, or why this should make it more memorable than someone living 10 miles from Cork city centre with a TXX routing key. IV51 is Portree and the north-eastern part of the Isle of Skye. Does that area spring to mind when you read or hear the letters IV? Do Derry or Strabane or Enniskillen or Armagh or Newry spring to mind when you read or hear the letters BT? If they do, is it because you're familiar with the fact that the BT postcode area covers all of Northern Ireland from many years of exposure to this fact? Or do the letters BT have some innate properties or characteristics that make you instantly think of Northern Ireland even if you know nothing about UK postcodes?

The reason people associate NW with London, NE with Gateshead, BT with Strabane and IV with Skye is because they know these postcodes already, because they've learned them, not because there's some instantly recognisable connection with the local areas or towns they cover.

There's nothing peculiarly difficult about learning to associate T12 with parts of Cork city and its surrounds compared to learning to associate IV51 with Portree of northern parts of the Isle of Skye.

marmurr1916 · 16-02-2016 12:30pm

Sam Russell wrote: »

Mod: Can we keep design questions to the other thread. This one is about implementation. When Google announce they have implemented it - that goes here. When Google announce they do not like the structure - that goes there.

So basically you're saying that any discussion about features of Eircode which might affect its implementation, or any discussion about possible ways in which it might be implemented (even if those possibilities haven't come to pass yet), are not about the implementation of Eircodes?

Fair enough, although that seems a peculiarly narrow and restrictive definition to me, I'll still respect it.

Sam Russell · 16-02-2016 1:45pm

marmurr1916 wrote: »

So basically you're saying that any discussion about features of Eircode which might affect its implementation, or any discussion about possible ways in which it might be implemented (even if those possibilities haven't come to pass yet), are not about the implementation of Eircodes?

Fair enough, although that seems a peculiarly narrow and restrictive definition to me, I'll still respect it.

Mod: Could you also respect not discussing mod decisions on thread. Use a PM if you wish to discuss such things.

ukoda · 16-02-2016 10:36pm

Add bonkers.ie to the list of users

https://twitter.com/autoaddress/status/699690243742633984

marmurr1916 · 17-02-2016 8:44am

Also from autoaddress:

Autoaddress ‏@autoaddress Feb 15
Q: Does a business need a license or special permission to request an #Eircode by phone or website?
A: No. Standard data protection applies.

clewbays · 18-02-2016 9:16pm

Polling card arrived today and it has my name and Eircode. Five items of promotional literature for candidates also arrived with an Eircode and addressed to The Household.

18-02-2016 9:40pm

clewbays wrote: »

Polling card arrived today and it has my name and Eircode. Five items of promotional literature for candidates also arrived with an Eircode and addressed to The Household.

Ours didn't, in fact they only had half of the address!

Sam Russell · 18-02-2016 10:20pm

clewbays wrote: »

Polling card arrived today and it has my name and Eircode. Five items of promotional literature for candidates also arrived with an Eircode and addressed to The Household.

Ours the same, but no Eircode for the polling station.

ukoda · 18-02-2016 10:38pm

These guys are pushing their software a lot on Twitter. It's the first pricing I've seen from a VAR

£20 for 500 look ups
£400 for 10,000 look ups

£ because they are an English company

Hopefully they are pitching this to the UK retailers who service Ireland, so the likes of amazon etc

http://www.eircodesoftware.ie

oscarBravo · 18-02-2016 10:55pm

ukoda wrote: »

£20 for 500 look ups
£400 for 10,000 look ups

4p a lookup - not bad pricing at all. I don't think too many businesses could complain that Eircode lookups are out of their reach at that rate.

There are several UK companies implementing Eircode lookup APIs, because they already have systems in place to offer similar services with UK postcodes, and they've extended them to handle Eircodes as well.

ukoda · 18-02-2016 11:31pm

Speaking of which, amazon customer service seem baffled as to why an eircode isn't validating when an Irish customer tried to sign up for Prime.

I presume the customer service team just thought it was in place, but exchanges like this are what will prompt amazon to start validating eircodes

https://twitter.com/amazonhelp/status/699991159523971072

plodder · 18-02-2016 11:38pm

Would google be a 500 billion dollar company today if they had charged 4p (or 0.004p) per lookup? Personally, I don't think so.

ukoda · 18-02-2016 11:44pm

plodder wrote: »

Would google be a 500 billion dollar company today if they had charged 4p (or 0.004p) per lookup? Personally, I don't think so.

Would my pet goldfish still be alive today if it was a dog? I don't think so

plodder · 18-02-2016 11:50pm

ukoda wrote: »

Would my pet goldfish still be alive today if it was a dog? I don't think so

I'm sorry for your goldfish ukoda

But the point I was making is that charging money for things that have dubious value, only has the effect of limiting the use of those things to people who are most prepared to pay for it.

ukoda · 18-02-2016 11:57pm

plodder wrote: »

I'm sorry for your goldfish ukoda But the point I was making is that charging money for things that have dubious value, only has the effect of limiting the use of those things to people who are most prepared to pay for it.

It's ok I'm over it now

Maybe you should ask google how much they charge per ad? Their revenue model is advertising. It's so so far away from being comparable to eircode.

From the list of companies already paying for it, they must have decided it wasn't dubious. For things like a checkout on a website with huge drop off rates and chart abandonment, anything you can do to make the process easier for a customer helps sales, like having simple address entry. It's unlikely that the VAR's are investing in eircode if they don't see any potential, they aren't stupid

oscarBravo · 19-02-2016 12:53am

plodder wrote: »

...charging money for things that have dubious value...

Its value isn't dubious to me. It's worth what I'm paying for it (which is slightly more than 4p a lookup, albeit not much).

If it's not worth 4p a lookup to you, you clearly don't have a requirement for it that justifies that miniscule cost. Which is fine; nobody's forcing you to pay for it.

If you have an occasional need to get details of an Eircode, you can get 15 of them every single day for free, and more if you can be bothered working around that limitation. If you need more than 15 lookups a day, it's getting hard to argue that the value of the lookups is dubious.

plodder · 19-02-2016 9:50am

Like google, the state could have offered the basic service for free. That would have driven its adoption. Like google, the state could have recovered the costs in other ways - in this case through economic efficiencies, increased economic activity and tax revenue, or perhaps through a paid-for premium service.

TheChizler · 19-02-2016 10:19am

plodder wrote: »

Like google, the state could have offered the basic service for free. That would have driven its adoption. Like google, the state could have recovered the costs in other ways - in this case through economic efficiencies, increased economic activity and tax revenue, or perhaps through a paid-for premium service.

It could be argued that they've already done that. They've given each address point a postcode for free, it can be used for free and given to others once you know it, and small volume users can do 15 lookups per day for free; 50 over Christmas. The premium service that Eircode provides is copies of its database in lite or full versions.

Value added resellers build applications to simplify use for companies who fall into the gap between 15 per day and the entire database, or who don't have the need or capability to to build their own applications.

BailMeOut · 19-02-2016 10:25am

oscarBravo wrote: »

Its value isn't dubious to me. It's worth what I'm paying for it (which is slightly more than 4p a lookup, albeit not much).

If it's not worth 4p a lookup to you, you clearly don't have a requirement for it that justifies that miniscule cost. Which is fine; nobody's forcing you to pay for it.

If you have an occasional need to get details of an Eircode, you can get 15 of them every single day for free, and more if you can be bothered working around that limitation. If you need more than 15 lookups a day, it's getting hard to argue that the value of the lookups is dubious.

What these 4p / per lookup companies are offering are API lookups. That's the value they add.

Eircode - its implemetation (merged)

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