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Are Phone Numbers Doomed To Die? (fortune.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Valentina Zarya writes at Fortune Magazine that the top 2016 prediction for David Marcus, Facebook's vice president of messaging products, is the disappearance of the phone number and its replacement by applications like Facebook's Messenger. " You can make video and voice calls while at the same time not needing to know someone's phone number," writes Marcus. "You don't need to have a Facebook account to use Messenger anymore, and it's also a cross platform experience – so you can pick up where you left off whether you're on a desktop computer, a tablet, or your phone." Jonah Berger, Wharton professor and author of "Contagious: Why Things Catch On" agrees. "For most of us, I think it's really hard to actually remember what someone's phone number actually is. We use our phones so often or we click on a button that has it. But if there was a test where you had to say, do you remember your best friends number or could you type in your best friend's number I think most of us would fail."
But not everyone agrees that Marcus' predictions are objective and disinterested. "It's all very well the company wanting to be the de facto Internet — especially in places like India. But drier minds and eyes might wonder whether the wish to eradicate phone numbers has something to do with not everyone having yet given Facebook their phone numbers," says Chris Matyszczyk. "It may well be that phone numbers will disappear. Some, though, might wonder how making their disappearance a company theme squares with what Marcus claims is the ultimate goal: 'It's all about delight.' This one's easy. It's all about delighting Facebook."
But not everyone agrees that Marcus' predictions are objective and disinterested. "It's all very well the company wanting to be the de facto Internet — especially in places like India. But drier minds and eyes might wonder whether the wish to eradicate phone numbers has something to do with not everyone having yet given Facebook their phone numbers," says Chris Matyszczyk. "It may well be that phone numbers will disappear. Some, though, might wonder how making their disappearance a company theme squares with what Marcus claims is the ultimate goal: 'It's all about delight.' This one's easy. It's all about delighting Facebook."
The fact that I cant on my cellphone put in 1800* to block every single 800 number from calling my phone is stupid. the phones can do it, why the hell doesnt google bake this into the damn os?
Cyanogenmod. Enable wildcards.
1800.*
why the hell doesnt google bake this into the damn os?
Because Google is an advertising company, and denying access to their partners would be like cutting their nose off.
Since I remember numbers better than names, I say lets abolish naming your kid, and just buy him/her a SIM card.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And that's what XMPP was supposed to have fixed. XMPP was really about decentralization and federation. You simply didn't need an account with Google or any particular company to participate. Then Google decided to cut off federation with gmail, making what could have been a great, widely-used protocol, into something incredibly broken. It was this breaking of XMPP by Google (after years of promoting XMPP) that marked the beginning of the change from "don't be evil" into what it has become today.
I used to run my own Jabber server with my own domain, communicating with gmail users and others, and it worked lovely until Google decided to cut off access to their users. Suddenly my own server became nearly useless with all my non-techy friends suddenly unable to communicate. Sure I could have granted them all accounts on my server, but most of them had just used the google chat program, and switching them to something more open would be difficult for them, to say nothing of *their* friends who are on gmail anyway.
So XMPP is essentially dead, thanks to google and we are not better off for it, no matter what they want us to believe about Hangouts.