SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 Murcus' 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."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 14 2016, @04:44PM
A general phone-number-like identifier would be nice, especially if it allows more descriptive naming and more services. However, it should be:
1. Backward-compatible with the existing phone system and numbering. For example, if "your-name-here@usa.phone" is the new general ID style, then existing phone numbers should work with it also: "987-654-3210@usa.phone".
2. Your ownership or usability of the ID doesn't depend on the existence or whims of any one ISP or company. If Facebook bytes the dust, you shouldn't lose your ID, for example. They can optionally host it and/or process it, but they don't own "your-name-here@usa.phone" or whatever the new ID string is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 14 2016, @05:51PM
If only there existed a federated messaging protocol... Oh well...
(Score: 2) by cykros on Friday January 15 2016, @12:36AM
Google Hangouts meets the first criteria, in that through Google Voice support builtin, normal phone numbers can be dialed from within it.
The latter criteria isn't actually even met by the existing phone system, as whether or not your phone number is allowed to be ported often falls to the whim of whichever company you have it through at the moment. While they usually play ball, it's not 100% always possible to bring your identity along with you when you change providers.
You'd likely need some sort of cryptographic hash ID based system in order to get this degree of independence from providers that you're after. Many communications systems are experimenting with this area these days (tox, bitmessage, etc), but I'm not holding my breath on their taking over any time soon. Probably shortly after federated xmpp has its day.
In any case, at the very least backward compatibility with legacy phone systems is going to be with us for awhile. It may go nearly entirely VoIP in one form or another sooner rather than later, but there's simply too much fragmentation compared with the universality of the phone system. I'd dare say its so entrenched that even if the next iPhone comes out with voice and sms features removed, we'll still have phone numbers be the standard for communicating with everyone. Everything else is just a novelty with some added features to be used amongst a relatively small specific group of people. Even Facebook account holders don't come close to the numbers of people with phone numbers in 2016...
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday January 15 2016, @04:06AM
as whether or not your phone number is allowed to be ported often falls to the whim of whichever company you have it through at the moment.
I'm not sure where you're located, but Line number portability is mandated where I live: [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps the rest of the world will get with the program at some point.
Originally, telephone numbers were specifically linked to geographic areas, but with the advent of digital switching and VOIP, that's no longer necessary. At the same time, with what would we replace telephone numbers? A directory owned, managed and published by Facebook? Please.
That way, they can not only spy on where folks go on the 'net, they can spy on who folks communicate with. As for the FB messenger application [wikipedia.org], it uses the MQTT protocol [wikipedia.org]. Since the protocol requires a "broker" there's ample access to gather what's euphemistically called "metadata." I haven't gone through the protcol spec [oasis-open.org] and I don't think I will, as I now know enough about it to be sure that I don't want to use it for text/voice messaging. Thanks, but no thanks.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr