> Horse shit. There is nothing wrong with telephone system or the numbering scheme or the fact that we use numbers.

There is never anything wrong with the technology you know. I think the Unix shell is a thing of beauty. You have a user interface and programming language all rolled into one, available on even the simplest of hardware. Put it in front of the average computer user, however, and they'll look at you like you have two heads.

I do not know the telephone system. For me, the internet has pretty much always been there so I had little need to use the phone and I still only use it a handful of times per year. Making a phone call is as confusing to me as it is to someone who has to dive into the command prompt once per year. On top of that, it seems like every time I try to use it, it fails in some way (disconnects, misrouted calls, etc.), adding to my frustrations.

The telephone system is pretty ingenious from a technical perspective, but it is a user experience nightmare for anyone who did not grow up with it. I know exactly how older people feel about computers that did not grow up with them, because that is me with the telephone.

We are at least trying to make computers more accessible, why are we ignoring the telephone?

Honest question: how does the telephone system confuse you?

-Dial a number, receive a person (or voicemail).

-Most people don't even dial numbers any more. Select contact, press send, receive person.

Do you use a cellphone or landline? Are you in the US? I'm on (crappy) AT&T service with a cell phone and haven't had a dropped or misrouted call...ever.

> how does the telephone system confuse you?

Confuse may not be the best word, intimidated maybe, but I don't know. I realize it is just the execution of basic steps.

As per my previous example, how does if [ -r /etc/passwd ]; then cat /etc/passwd; fi confuse someone? It too is just simple, repeatable steps.

> Do you use a cellphone or landline? Are you in the US?

I have had problems with both, though cell does seem more prone to it, even in strong reception areas. This is in Canada, spanning multiple providers. I find it actually quite amazing how often it does fail for me, though I recall reading some stats not too long ago that showed the number of calling errors to be surprisingly high.

The telephone system does not work the way you think it works.

We could talk about POTS, but that's largely irrelevant. Worldwide, the vast majority of phone calls start and end with a GSM terminal. Each call is a digital, packet-switched connection from end to end and a supremely complex one at that. A call, even a solely fixed-line call, isn't connected through analog switching, but through a series of database queries that establish a route.

90% of telephone handsets in the world are complex digital devices. They each have multiple identities - in the case of GSM, the IMEI of the handset, the IMSI of the SIM, the MSISDN of the subscriber and one or more telephone numbers. This isn't some bolt-on to POTS anymore, it's the default mode. there are whole generations in the developing world who have grown up with telephony but have never even seen a fixed-line telephone.

Saying telephone switching is simple because it uses DTMF signalling is like saying sending an e-mail through Siri is simple because you just have to speak. The hidden complexity is immense. There are already multiple DNS-type layers involved in establishing the simplest of telephone connections.

I know how it works.

You are solely considering the latest generation of equipment. There is still a lot of analogue kit (crossbar switches/relays) out there across the globe. There are even small pockets of it in the UK.

POTS is definitely not irrelevant if you throw away the notion that everyone is not an iPhone wielding hipster.

However you miss the point. The existing abstraction of "phone number" is so universally powerful that the underlying implementation, regardless of what encapsulation and routing algorithms used is effectively a logical replacement for the analogue switching.

It's like "virual analogue synthesizers" which are replacements for synthesizers. The abstraction was so powerful, the new technology emulates the old.

Adding a DNS systems doesn't remove the phone numbers, not any more than DNS prevents you from typing IP addresses.

You could very well have it on smartphones and the likes without increasing complexity on either the actual phone network or the basic analog handsets.

EDIT: Personally, I think what Google Voice does - giving you a single number per person instead of per device/SIM card - fixes the major problem(s) without breaking backward compatibility. The only problem is the lack of international support.

That's a phone book! We've solved the problem already.

DNS is an automated phonebook, yes. I type a name, it figures out the number, 'dials' it for me, lets the network route my 'call' and poof I connect.

It's all about the automation.

Yes, but DNS also assumes there is exactly one match for a given text string.

In RL, there are a lot of "John Smiths", and it would be non-trivial for a system to figure out which one you wanted to call without some serious hinting (like access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, G+, etc. accounts), and it might even have to access a private list of names/numbers to figure out that you probably want the John Smith who works with Alice Bell (an entry in your phonebook)...

We made it work for emails. And guessing an email of someone (which is hard to do) something that stopped us to adopt emails.

if its someone you have him in your friendcircle->app

I believe we need a proper open identity system in general but this could be a start.

The solution wont be facebook.com/nickname nor vox.io/nickname

It will be providerOrContextOrWorkplaces.com/name maybe

I trust a verbal number exchange far more than a verbal email/id exchange.

why?

How do you spell that no wait did you say M is that upper or lower case how do I type an underscore into this thing oh the word underscore was that .net or .biz too late I typed .com automatically.

The places I've seen that give automatic email addresses have used a formula like first initial, last name, autoincrementing number. I think this is a pretty good system, but if you go worldwide you're going to get nice big numbers - entering name and number almost exactly like you do already. But if you misspell something based on a verbal communication it breaks harder.

realy [email protected] is unique looking up some one by name in a countrys phone book is not!

How may John Smith's are there in your country ?

Why not use the same system any web service in existence already uses - nicknames? Any text string is still easier to remember than an arbitrary number.

I've been using the nick 'brk' for maybe 20 years, but I still frequently come across random places where it has already been taken.

So, you'd need a nick registry, like domain names, and you'd run into issues with your friends that have "common" nicks having to register and use a different name. I think this merely trades one well-known set of limitations for a much different and less understood set of limitations without actually truly solving anything.

How is that any simpler or faster than typing a number? One of the things I still miss to this day when switching to an iPhone was how quickly I could make a call on my old Motorola. I didn't even need to look at the phone. I've since switched to an Android device with a physical keyboard, and that's made typing a lot easier. But I really wouldn't want to have to type in some fully qualified name every time I wanted to make a call.

I guess you'd work around that by having a local address book on the phone, but now I've barely gained anything from that, given I already have a local address book on my phone.

Spot on! This is exactly my problem with this.

I have a Nokia 6303. I press a couple of buttons and I'm calling the person I want. It's so unbelievably solved.

I have a Nokia E65. I press one button and say the person's name, and the call is made.

Buttons? Bah ;)

My 6303 does that but I look like an idiot doing it ;-)

An etc/host file is easy to use when you got it set up. Thrn its just a few clicks.

Thw fundamental problem is the same Numbers are a techincal layer i as a user dont zo know about

An /etc/hosts file is something you set up locally. How is that different than an address book then? I feel like I must be missing something.

Can't you say the same of most technological advances?

Edit: So your reply is essentially: "This is stupid! The way we currently do things is good enough!" and I get down voted?

As the parent commenter, I upvoted you. Yes, you can say that of most technological "advances". I agree entirely.

Very little genuine improvement happens in technology. Most of it is false starts. When it does happen, everyone notices it and everyone uses it.

Some major technological advances in the last 50 years: The Internet, Mobile Telephones, LCD screens good enough to replace CRTs, Vehicle safety improvements.

The telephone paradigm exists virtually unchanged in its mobile incarnation because it was that good to start with. Someone just got rid of the wires.

Absolutely agree.

I can also agree that since phones and the global system is important infrastructure, it would probably be a disaster to disrupt it for the sake of a modest convenience boost that is only applied to the world's wealthy. So, the suggestions aren't there yet.

But, man, haven't you felt the phone number system is 10 times as archaic now that cell phones are around? I can never call my credit card company with questions, because they ask my phone number for verification, and I can't remember which is on file (/slight exaggeration)! That became such a problem that governments decreed people were entitled to keep their number when they switched cell providers. We want to be tied to a single, convenient contact identifier, I think.

You are just wrong. We might want to have our own contact identifiers because that is how the system works and it's convenient, but that's a symptom of the problem.

Let me phrase it like this: whose phone numbers do you actually know? If you're like most people, the answer is "almost nobody's." You identify friends based on name and context -- and sometimes you can pull an address out of your hat. The mapping to a phone number is accomplished by an address book. And that's true more broadly: the reason you want to keep your number is because you know there are a lot of pointers in a lot of address books containing this number, and you'd like them to keep pointing to you. You like your friends and don't want to hassle them with updating their phones.

The problem is foundational: given a description of a person and the contexts from which you know them, it is not easy for a computer to accurately reconstruct who that person was. We could solve the entire rest of the problem, actually, pretty easily. We could, if we wanted to, create this system: you register with a system and it creates a new business-card dropoff for you: "up8 m2x d4z". Feel free to register a couple of these if you want; there's something like 100 trillion of them and we're assigning them in pseudorandom order. Your online anonymous alias can be "h3c if3 fdc". That simple ID string points to a publicly-available business card: name, phone, email, current employer, photo, fax, RSA public key, dog's FTP server -- whatever you want or don't want to put there. Any address book can query it, either via the phone network or via the Internet or whatever else have you.

So the layer of abstraction needed is no more complicated than phone numbers are now, and if you worked out how to pay for it and scale it, then mobile phones could immediately query present or near-present data on the fly rather than demanding that it remains absolutely constant.

But the problem is really search. Looking up 't6o 19r 4q2' might be very easy for computers and might be very easy for humans to communicate, but when I want to say "crap, I lost my address book, what's my friend's mobile phone number?" I am still left checking Facebook and crap, they didn't put it up there, maybe their LinkedIn has it? No they don't have a LinkedIn. Hm. Maybe I should call someone else who knows them...

Names are far from unique identifiers, so people created standards for uniquely identifying people, you now want to create another one well guess what: http://xkcd.com/927/

The reality is it's not a technical problem in need of a better standard. If you meet someone at a party they can give you a phone number, an email address, a Facebook act, a linked in act, IM, skype, etc etc. But the universal system is simply Identifier:Service and we already have that and it works really well. Some of these come bundled with other Identifier:Service groupings, but just because I met you at a party does not mean I want to give out all of them. Backing up your address book is a side issue with simple direct solutions that are up to you to implement.

The tool free 800 and for-pay 900 systems are already one redirection layer in the telephone network. When you call an 800 number it's actually an SS7 signaling database lookup that then redirects to another number. The same is true for calling cards (remember those?).

In mobile phone systems the telephone number really is a simplier naming scheme. The call is routed based upon some id number for the SIM card/phone which is first looked up based on the phone number you dialed. For GSM this is a 64-bit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier (IMSI) and who wants to remember 64-bit values (IPv6 anyone?). AFAIK GSM says nothing about having a 1:1 mapping between phone number and IMSI, but it's been a long time since I did GSM work.

Thanks for that technical insights!

I am aware of phone number forwarders. I use them for company phone numbers.

As I said with Google Voice it solves the problem to the biggest extend.

But you as an expert might know that… Are there any services that offer me a Global Number that won't require "international call" charges from international people who call me ? Would this even be technically possible?

I'm sure there's someone out there that does it, but you'd have to pay the charges instead of your customer. Call routing is designed to make money first and route calls second.

Hm sounds as efficient as sticking with one number no matter where you are and accepting roaming.

Oh, if only phone numbers were ubiquitous across the entire globe.

Have you tried calling a phone in random foreign countries, going off a local phone number which hasn't been expressly written for foreigners? Figuring out which parts you have to dial and which parts are only for local people gets really annoying.

Additionally, there's no expiration mechanism. The volume has thankfully declined, but I still get calls on my home phone for the guy who had the number before me, even though he hasn't had that number for five years now. The only reason numbers are ever reused is because we have to keep them short enough to be dialed by a human on a regular basis, and the only reason we have that requirement is because we don't have something better.

Yes plenty of times. And I've had to muddle with foreign operators and they've had to deal with my really bad attempts at their languages. At the end of the day I'd got where I wanted to go though and had some interesting conversations on the way.

Where I want to call is somtimes a shack in the middle of some African state with a 60 year old phone dangling off a rusty, noisy aluminium pair with as many repairs as you can imagine on it (my cousin lives out there). It still works as well as it did 60 years ago for them.

One of my parents even had a UK BT area code in their company name. It got changed three times in the 90s. They are stil around. It still works for them.

What people are proposing regarding swapping out or augumenting numbers with something else is a wholesale reengineering of all voice communication networks worldwide. I.e breaking everything for convenience.

Numbers have been "good enough" for the last 100 years and probably will be "good enough" for the next 100 years.

Humans have this strange ability to contract out some of their brainpower so they don't have to think about something or can get around some minor inconvenience. It's almost like a numeric witch hunt in this case.

I'm going to call it "there's an app for that syndrome" roughly translated as "automate something simple so I don't have to use another 5 brain cells".

And yes I get people phone my line asking for the people who used to live here. But it happens less than I get junk mail through my door.