Adele McAlear wrote a great post this week about ICANN’s decision to remove restrictions on top level domains (TLDs). Essentially this means that .com and .net could soon be replaced by .anything and .everything. This started me thinking about how I have been using web addresses/URLs lately. More specifically, how I haven’t been using them very much at all.

For the average user, typing a full web address is probably a common occurrence. I’ve even resorted to the “type-in” technique to find a new site occasionally. However, I find myself visiting the address bar much less as the primary means of navigating the web. Yet I discovering new sites all the time. What changed?

An over-reliance on Google search probably accounts for much of this shift (I even use it as a spell-checker). All the blogs I frequent are already in Google Reader, new ones are just a subscribe click away. I’ve filled my bookmark toolbar with links to the social networks I’m most active in. Anything without an RSS feed that I want to refer to gets added to del.icio.us. Most of the new sites I visit are via hyperlinks in something I’m reading or referrals from other “trusted sources.”

Twitter’s 140-character limit has increased the popularity of a number of URL-shortening services like TinyURL and is.gd. StumbleUpon, and other sites that collaboratively filter links, are built around the concept of browsing without the address bar.

Given the sheer number of domains currently in use and the prospect of an unlimited number of new TLDs to contend with, how much longer before the address bar becomes irrelevant (or relegated to a much less prominent location in the browser)? What about the rise of the Semantic Web, where all kinds of data, not just web pages, is interconnected? Are we at the dawn of a new way to experience the web? I’d be interested in your thoughts.