This post was inspired by the Globe and Mail article linked below and a lecture given by one of my computer science professors (David Cheriton) on the theory behind directories and naming.
Telephone numbers have been used since the late 1800s as a way to make connecting phone calls easier for human operators. Eventually, rotary dialing and touch tones grew into the new world of automated call switching. Today, telephone numbers have a variety of purposes. They are used for everything from caller ID to locating the source of emergency 911 calls.
The history of telephone numbers is quite interesting on its own, saying much about the evolution of the telephone in the American household over the past 150 years. Wikipedia has a great history. Telephone numbers are most commonly used as the method for dialing a telephone call, or in abstractly, signaling the destination of your call. Yet, they also have many other uses that don’t immediately come to mind. For landline telephones, the area code and exchange indicate the geographic area of the number’s owner. With the emergence of cellphones this has become somewhat less reliable. New techniques such as aGPS is needed to locate a mobile phone. As mentioned before, determining the exact location of a calling phone, either through caller ID or aGPS, is incredibly important to the success of 911 and emergency responders. Informally, the area code has historically given a clue to the residence of a number. A Seinfeld episode even found Elaine rejected by a potential date for lacking the proper New York City area code. Finally, a phone number number can inform you of any long-distance charges (or 1-900 charges if you are into that type of thing) associated with a call.
One other less obvious benefit of a phone number is that the number of the destination must be known before you can place a call. You can’t just pick up the phone and call someone, you have to know their number first. For many people and businesses, their numbers are published in the white or yellow pages. However, many others, and almost everyone with a cell phone, enjoy the privacy an unlisted number brings.
Knowing the purposes of a telephone number, the question of their utility now arises. As modern communications evolve, does the 19th century telephone number fit the demands of 21st century technology? With the emergence of smartphones and touchpads, no longer are we constrained to a simple 12-button keypad or rotary dial. Additionally, most people are now available over several forms of communications, even considering only those voice-based ones. The result is living with several phone numbers- home landline, office, cell, Skype. Single Number Reachability (SRN) is a common solution, with services such as Google Voice gaining popularity for their ability to dial a single telephone number and reach the recipient regardless of which phone number they receive the call on. Unsure about your location at a certain time? With Single Number Reachability this is not a problem, have a caller dial your SRN number and all of your phones will ring. Additional intelligence and features can be piled very high here, routing calls based on the caller, time of day, current location, and many other filters.
Still, Single Number Reachability is great, but the caller still needs to dial ten digits to start the call. The digits are the main problem here. We all have enough account numbers and ID numbers in our lives to make a calculator go cross-eyed, why add the burden of telephone numbers as well. They are hard to remember, frequently mis-dialed, and offer little benefit with today’s technology.
My solution: Get rid of the numbers, entirely.
When I call someone, I want to do so by name. If multiple people have the same name, let me use some other identifying information like a photograph, address or job title to make my choice. I want this phone book available on everything I use to make phone calls, synchronized across all of them. When I choose a person, the directory knows the correct phone to ring to reach the person. This could employ standard SNR technology like Google Voice does today, I don’t really care how the internals are built.
With a system like this, I would no longer have to give out phone numbers to businesses or people met in a bar. Imagine the end of scribbling a cute girl’s or guy’s digits on your hand, only to have them rinsed off by a spilled drink. The obvious downside (for some) is also the end of faked phone numbers, but its just as easy to lie about one’s name as about their phone number. Even today, my Android phone takes a step in the right direction by automatically updating my contacts phone numbers in response to changes in their Facebook profiles.
By having a large global directory, we would all be free from the curse of having to remember and manage a large rolodex of contact information for our friends and family. This frees our minds and time up to spend on more valuable activities. There are no technical reasons preventing a global white pages as I’ve outlined them here. However as seen in recent controversies over Facebook’s privacy policy, social and legal barriers are often drags on technical progress.
References:
Hanging Up On The Phone Book (The Globe and Mail, 6/6/2010)