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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!
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.
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.
"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?
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.