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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: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Thursday January 14 2016, @05:09PM
You're all thinking about personal use of the phone. Most of my phone use is for business. Yes, internal communications between offices could be served by a product like Skype, but we're a long way off from replacing traditional phones service for businesses with any sort of app. Imagine you have a 20-year-old industrial appliance still in production and you need to make a support call. You go to dial the toll free number from the manual, but oh, no one has anything that works like POTS anymore. Traditional phone service will become like snail mail--relegated to official and business uses and less often used for personal communications.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 14 2016, @06:00PM
Well, you're sufferring from the "everyone's like me" illusion.
I for one use the phone almost exclusively for private purposes. Almost all work communication goes via skype.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 14 2016, @06:55PM
sudo mod me up