Abeon Tech

With the explosion of online media and social network sites a need has come to keep a list of contact points, sometimes under many different aliases.

The average person now has several points of online contact ranging from Email addresses, Facebook, Twitter, personal website or blog and usually a few others.

I believe a service for consolidating these contact points is just a matter of time.
It has been attempted before with web sites like LinkedIn, Friend Feed and such like. These, however, tend to focus more on social networking than contact point aggrigation.

Could the Digerati be leading the way for another revolution?
I believe that changes are coming, and in a big way!

Heres why…

Our brain generally prefer storing memories and information using Mnemonics over other forms, such as numerical data. Remembering a list of phone numbers, for example, can take a while unless you have a great short term memory… Or Jedi mind powers!

Our brains seem to find it easier to recall words with a meaning attached and names, which is why the Domain name system was created. At the time, people didn’t want to remember and then type 209.85.227.103 into the address bar to get to google… I can’t think why!

If the mobile phone carriers would follow the example set by the DNS websites use to convert I.P. addresses into domain names and assign a name based system, it could open the way to an easier way of contacting friends, family and colleagues.

I think we could use one name or handle for all of our contact points if the phone companies would follow where others have already tread. It shouldn’t be too hard to impliment but I think it would have to be limited to inter-country calls due to the global population limit (an estimated 6,924,173,550 people at time of posting!) or the naming convention would have to be very convoluted.

There are a few obvious problems that spring to mind:

• Using real names could lead to unwanted calls for celebrities and the like.
• Large companies could end up with control of all the names or numbers.
• Cross compatibility could take a while to filter through.

But I doubt any of these will be a show stoppers when there are millions of possible users to market to.

Imagine if you could buy a sim card online or in a shop, register it online to link it to a name of your choice. People could then simply “call” your name or number to contact you.

It may be an extra step, but wouldn’t be required as the number could still be called. A firmware update would be needed to allow current phones to “dial” names. But again, this would not be hard to impliment.

I believe as soon as we can call our name or handle other services will try to use a similar model and intergration with services like Twitter and SMS. That can only lead to a more unified form of contacting everyone!

Viva La Revolution!