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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."
But I hope the "database" isn't Facebook. I would hope it would be something like DNS/Bind in the IP world....
I bet Facebook would think twice about wanting to replace phone numbers with Facebook IDs when they see the regulations common carriers operate under.
Quite a few people are not on Facebook, Twitter, etc. It would also be _hugely_ unprofessional to do any job-related communication over such a venue.
This is just the usual bullshit from people that get starry-eyes when fantasizing how the future will be, but have no clue how reality actually works. Basically the only old global communication channel that has vanished is the telegram. And there are services in many countries that will print out an email and deliver it to the target address for a fee. So, really, complete nonsense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Did IP numbers disappear?
Behind the comms there will still be numbers or codes to lead to the address.
I'd be damned to use Facebook's spying services when I don't even have to log in or go to a specific site or app to press a pre-set button and make a call.
Or simply scan through my address book, click on the name and talk.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Telephone service is a public utility, and as such has a variety of regulations, including on how pricing works, and where service is provided. If it is to be replaced, we need some other sort of public utility that can be used for communications.
- Universally Ubiquitous
- Nationalized
- Lowest Common Denominator
- (for POTS anyway) Pretty damn rock solid in most of the world
Did Facebook kill Email? No.
Did Google kill the address bar? No.
Did Apple kill the PC? No.
Did solar panels (insert any other energy technology) kill the grid? No.
Will Facebook messenger (or any company-centric IM system) kill telephones? No.
Next flamebait topic please.
Bye!
Phone numbers are the defacto, common and relatively stable identifier that most people possess today. Yes, it may be archaic, but most people are comfortable with it, a global, relatively neutral means of communication. It's neutrality is protected by a patchwork of government regulations worldwide, and until one single company, alliance of companies, or single open standard becomes globally adopted at the same level as the phone number, Facebook or anyone else isn't going to replace it. While I'm sure Facebook dreams of usurping that role, their penetration isn't nearly global enough to provide the scale to challenge it. Now, if they created alliances with the Tencents of the world for a unified standard, maybe, but we're a long, long way from that.
There is a need for a universal identifier standard for recipients and communication of some kind. A proprietary one is not acceptable, in the least because tech companies come and go like pop stars.
A new standard would only replace phone numbers if it offers something significantly better. Standards are rarely displaced by something just a little bit better. It's why QWERTY keyboards and SQL (as a language) are still common.
A communication ID standard that offers letters and longer identifiers may be competitive, but there's nobody pushing such in a non-proprietary way. (Phone numbers can also spell out short mnemonics, but in an awkward way.)
The phone system could morph into such because an existing phone number could still be a valid identifier within the new standard, somewhat like how UNICODE still contains ASCII.
Table-ized A.I.
Yep. Trolling by Betteridge effect
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I hereby predict that Facebook will disappear before phone numbers.
Let's come back in 20 years and compare my track record with David Marcus's.
Getting rid of phone numbers could get rid of bullshit phone sales people or so-called telemarketers, nonsense charities, and bill collectors. Since I uusally get several annoying such calls, every day, I think getting rid of phone numbers is a great idea.
but there are actually a few phone numbers that I remember, and can type on a telephone keypad (or the numbers-only widget on a smartphone) quicker than I can look them up (even with type-ahead on the person's name). They're also harder make data-entry errors with than a written-out e-mail address, or, worse, someone's Facebook or Google+ name.
I would say you heard it here first, but I would be surprised if it weren't posted already. :)
telephone service costs like 60 dollars a month minimum
I don't know where you're getting that figure, as I get telephone service from Virgin Mobile USA for $90 per year.
Yeah but it can be just like an IP address. You don't remember it or use it directly. It can also change from time to time, and you can have more than one.
I want to contact a person, not a phone. I don't care if that person answers from a phone on a 4G cellular network, or computer on a wired network. Therefore, I couldn't care less about the MSISDN.
The best identifier right now is the email address. It is unique, cross-platform, standardized, free and vendor-neutral. Unlike phone numbers and Facebook.
"phone numbers" are how the switching -- and billing -- are done for landlines, cell phones, and for many data services like DSL.
they are not going away. he can hide his, but he can't change everybody elses.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Phone numbers are going to die. But Facebook isn't the answer. Any proprietary solution isn't the answer.
It's especially not going to happen outside of the US. Imagine the president of Russia ordering military maneuvers using Facebook Messenger. Not going to happen.
It would be extremely complicated to switch away from phone numbers and phone numbers in and of themselves do not have considerable drawbacks, so phone numbers will probably be around for the foreseeable future. We humans will no doubt see the actual number less often as our software gets more intelligent, but the number will still exist, much like the ip address of a server.
FB can wind up abandoned as quickly as it gained steam. We saw that with Geocities, Hotmail, and MySpace. I can trust AT&T to be around a long time.
AT&T can fall off the map tomorrow, and phone numbers continue to work around the world. The advantage of phone and email (as technologies) over facebook messenger is that they aren't tied to a particular company AT ALL.
My email address will work independently of any company. And i move my email address from host company to company, as I see fit, or even self host if I feel the need.
My phone, likewise, I've moved between multiple carriers over the years; if carrier A started pissing me off too much, I'd move to carrier B.
The idea that you can have a messenger account with out a facebook account is just smoke and mirrors... of course you have a facebook account.
Do NOT want.
You have an IP address. Do you know it? Your computer can't really function without it nowadays. It's there, but it's not necessary to know.
Your phone has an IMEI number. Do you know it? Do you know what IP address it was assigned? Do you care? No.
But what detail do you remember? What do you login with? How do you give a contact your details? I don't know about you but I don't read out my phone number except in very rare circumstances. At worst, someone dials the other party's number ONCE, and then we both assign the number to a contact on our phones. With name, and photo. The things that remind us of that person. Nobody cares about the number.
Nobody is saying numbers will go away. We're saying nobody needs know them and it would only take a single protocol to come along with a hint of "coolness" to get rid of them forever.
Rather than "My number is..." and then a string of numbers, you'll just say "I'm fredbloggs21 on Whatsbook". And people will be able to get your phone number (which they'll store as Fred in their phones), email, IM, etc. just from that. They already do. The younger generations don't piss about with phone numbers already. They have no need. They find each other on facebook and then from there it's "What your instagram?" or whatever.
Phone numbers will die out of common use, the same way that IP addresses will. Nobody cares about what their particular one is, nobody need know it, nobody need share it. At worst, you give a descriptive name via a service that encompasses that number without you knowing. No different to DNS or email (Do you know what IP of what email server your email goes to when sent to your domain? Or that it goes to port 25? Because 99.9% of people couldn't give a shit).
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.
You would never do this for business though. And when it comes to communication methods it is business that wins. That is why email continues to dominate despite how many headlines saying email is dead.
I can see the phone number giving way to an IPV6 addess eventually, but it's not going to transform into some messenger app.
The LAST thing I want is Facebook acting as a platform for ANY of my essential communications. They have repeatedly lied - over and over - about privacy. No way!