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I find it interesting how so many people still find it acceptable in 2014 to be using a "phone number" as their id. It's a number you can't even pick yourself:

I find it interesting how so many people still find it acceptable in 2014 to be using a "phone number" as their id. It's a number you can't even pick yourself: you _pay_ to get a randomly assigned digits, at best with the ability to reroll (also not always free). To me, it feels like someone using an `@aol.com` email in 2014. Or a rotary phone.

btgeekboy 12y ago
The phone number is a backwards compatibility feature. We have modern ways of locating a user (see SIP, Email), but those won't be compatible with POTS. The use case here, Apple's iMessage, in fact allows users to use alternate methods of user lookup, including multiple email addresses. If you don't find it acceptable, what do you propose as an alternative?
- shurcooL 12y ago
  > If you don't find it acceptable, what do you propose as an alternative? So far, the best alternative for id that I've found is... Email address. It's highly available, free to create, and you can pick your own letters/numbers that are meaningful. It can even be your name. Definitely better than phone number digits at being an id that I can share with my friends or those who I want to be able to contact me. (For voice calls, I primarily use FaceTime Audio because they support email as id. But I also have skype, voip number for backwards compatibility, etc.)
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    Phone numbers are portable between providers, email addresses are not. So email addresses make worse identifiers (where consistency rather than encoded meaning is the important thing) than phone numbers. (Also, the "pay to get a randomly assigned number" isn't always true: my Google Voice number was free, and I got to ask for particular digits string to be included and got to choose from a list of numbers that met that requirement.)
retroafroman 12y ago
In one foreign country that I know of (Mongolia), can pick from a list of available phone numbers when you sign up for service. They also hold them as commodities which can be bought or sold, as some of the older numbers had a numbering scheme which made them seem more prestigious. Each network has different numbering schemes, so you can tell what network someone is using by their number. Unfortunately, networks also charge more (or at least used to) for texts/calls between networks than within the network.

btgeekboy 12y ago

The phone number is a backwards compatibility feature. We have modern ways of locating a user (see SIP, Email), but those won't be compatible with POTS. The use case here, Apple's iMessage, in fact allows users to use alternate methods of user lookup, including multiple email addresses. If you don't find it acceptable, what do you propose as an alternative?

shurcooL 12y ago
> If you don't find it acceptable, what do you propose as an alternative? So far, the best alternative for id that I've found is... Email address. It's highly available, free to create, and you can pick your own letters/numbers that are meaningful. It can even be your name. Definitely better than phone number digits at being an id that I can share with my friends or those who I want to be able to contact me. (For voice calls, I primarily use FaceTime Audio because they support email as id. But I also have skype, voip number for backwards compatibility, etc.)
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Phone numbers are portable between providers, email addresses are not. So email addresses make worse identifiers (where consistency rather than encoded meaning is the important thing) than phone numbers. (Also, the "pay to get a randomly assigned number" isn't always true: my Google Voice number was free, and I got to ask for particular digits string to be included and got to choose from a list of numbers that met that requirement.)

retroafroman 12y ago

In one foreign country that I know of (Mongolia), can pick from a list of available phone numbers when you sign up for service. They also hold them as commodities which can be bought or sold, as some of the older numbers had a numbering scheme which made them seem more prestigious. Each network has different numbering schemes, so you can tell what network someone is using by their number. Unfortunately, networks also charge more (or at least used to) for texts/calls between networks than within the network.