3 ms·

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 te

by bwarp 15y ago

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.

tatsuke95 15y ago
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.
- drostie 15y ago
  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...
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    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/ 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.

by bwarp 15y ago

tatsuke95 15y ago

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.

drostie 15y ago
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...
- onemoreact 15y ago
  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/ 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.