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This is entirely true, but our phone contact lists are essentially the internet back in the day that everyone maintained their own /etc/hosts. That is, it would be nice is there was some kind of DNS for phone numbers. I don't think this is the solution, but I understand why they're doing it. (Well, aside from the lock-in aspects.)

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I view my contact list as more of a list of bookmarks rather than a list of entries in hosts. The main difference is that domain names are still uniquely identifying, whereas a name (e.g. first middle last) is not.

I think facebook is the solution most people use now.

I decided against that "solution" when Facebook took it upon themselves to promote their @facebook.com contact information over whatever users had previously setup.

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