You know what I recently observed? A bunch of kindergarteners fastening their shoes to their feet with velcro straps.
Their shoes also had little blinky lights on them, so that cars don't run them over, when they chase a soccer ball into the street. Let make all the adults wear velcro shoes with blinky lights on them too.
Considering how often I have to retie the laces while dancing, I would definitely consider getting dancing shoes with velcro.
As for typing URLs, I do that, too, but autocompletion takes over after one or two characters. E.g., 'ne' suffices to get me to the HN front page. Navigation for me is pretty much all search or autocomplete, followed by normal link following. Except for a couple of bookmarklets, I do not use bookmarks. Back in the nineties, I used bookmarks a lot.
Once in a while, I will manually change a URL already in the location bar or paste one in and modify it.
However, I do look at URLs a lot. They often provide valuable navigational clues. And I appreciate well-structured URLs, such as the readwrite.com ones you posted, and I scorn the opaque numerical messes that some content management systems generate. I agree with the article.
I still need to open source that collection, because it's huge and has been super useful for me. I'm just not entirely sure what the best way would be.
They go to Google to visit a site. They don't type URLs.
They go to google.com, enter "Facebook" and click on the 1st result.
Remember the Facebook Login fiasco?
http://readwrite.com/2010/02/11/how_google_failed_internet_m...
Google showed this post when people searched for "Facebook Login":
http://readwrite.com/2010/02/10/facebook_wants_to_be_your_on...