The death of the phone number→
I hate phone numbers. They’re a relic of an outmoded system that both wireless and wireline carriers use to keep people trapped on their services — a false technological prison built of nothing but laziness and hostility to consumers. In fact, I can’t think of a single telecom service that is as restrictive as the phone number: email can be accessed from any device … [y]et the phone number remains stubbornly fixed with a single carrier and single device, even as consumers begin to move every other aspect of their lives to the cloud.
Nilay Patel from This Is My Next wrote an interesting article calling for the end of phone numbers in favor of a universal way of contacting someone that isn’t tied down to phone carriers. He then goes on to detail what the major tech players — Google, Microsoft, Apple — are doing to help forward the cause. I doubt that phone numbers are going away anytime soon, but I’m on board with idea.
Based on my early experiences with iMessage, the system actually works much better when tied to your email address than your phone number. One of the best features of iMessage is that it syncs your messages across all your iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) so that you can resume any previous conversation from any device. The problem comes when someone sends you an iMessage to your phone number (instead of your email address). That message can only be accessed from your iPhone since your iPad/iPod aren’t associated with that phone number. That totally kills the experience in my opinion, and it’s something that Apple may want to look at before it actually releases iMessage. The problem is compounded by the fact that most people have been trained to message people via their phone number, not their email address, and iMessage is seamlessly built into the default SMS application. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple can come up with an elegant solution to help free the world from phone numbers once and for all. Perhaps Apple can link Apple IDs to a specific phone number so that all messages sent to that phone number will automatically be forwarded to the user’s Apple ID as well. Regardless, I’m pretty excited for iMessage to launch, if only so that I won’t have to worry as much about going over my text message plan. [This Is My Next]
