October 28, 2006

Reach PayPal in Five Keystrokes or Fewer !!!

"How many licks does it take to get the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop? One, Two, Three?" The world may never know, but it takes exactly five keystrokes to get to http://www.paypal.com. But how can this be? There are 10 keystrokes in paypal.com (not including the Enter key), not 5!

The clues leading to the answer can be found only by examining the history of PayPal. PayPal was not always named PayPal. It was founded in January 1999 under then name FieldLink and renamed Confinity later that same year. In May 2000, Confinity merged with another company and the combined entities renamed themselves PayPal.

Can you name the company that merged with Confinity? The answer is the third-to-last letter in the alphabet: X.com, to be exact. X.com and Confinity were competitors who merged to form PayPal. The URL http://www.x.com now points to http://www.paypal.com. So, if you're in a real hurry, just type x.com and you'll get to PayPal (paypal.com) in half the keystrokes!

Internet Explorer users can get to PayPal even quicker by typing x into the address bar, then pressing Ctrl-Enter.