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Comment by sycren | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering, this might seem absolutely ridiculous, but would Facebook not benefit from having their own mobile operating system, even if its based off Android. Services are no longer apps or on the web but part of the system. Phone numbers are obsolete, you would phone facebook contacts as you would on skype. Such a system could perhaps offer better advertising capabilities and offer another competitor against Google and Apple on the mobile landscape..

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>> Phone numbers are obsolete, ...

Let's not get carried away, this is not true at all. Even outside of tech circles, there are plenty of people that have no interest in what Facebook offers.

I type a phone number exactly once. When I enter it into my contact book. After that, I only ever tap a person's name.

Phone numbers are definitely obsolete.

Nitpick: This is like saying handlebars on a bicycle are obsolete because you only have to install them once.

Phone numbers are abstracted, but they are definitely not obsolete.

You could use the same argument to say IP Address are obsolete because of DNS, but I don't think IP addresses or phone numbers are going away any time soon.

IP(v4) addresses are going away though! No one but the network staff will notice.

Semantically, choosing "obsolete" might have been incorrect, but I think the point stands. IP address and phone numbers don't matter anymore to the end users.

Thats true, but I think there could be a way around that if we had a domain name service for telephone numbers whereby instead of having to remember a 12-10 digit number with area codes for someone, we only need to remember a word or sentence and since a string (lower alphabet only) is base 26 it might be easier. Also could we not run out of phone numbers anyway like with ipv4?

Thats happened in the UK before, for my home town anyway. They just added an extra digit to the number after the area code.

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