Imagine for a moment that in order to visit a website you had to first acquire the IP address from either the site owner or someone close to the site owner then save it off in your browser with a meaningful name to you like “Bill Parker Blog number 3”. That would be completely ridicules but for some reason we allow our phone system to work this way, building what is essentially large HOSTS files in our mobile devices with name to number mappings.
How cool would it be to never have to save another number unless you chose to “bookmark” it? Shouldn’t you be able to grab your phone and type a unique address (email, username, etc) and simply have a third party service look it up and dial for you? Phone number changes would only need to be made in one location and dropping your phone in the pool would no longer cause you to lose information about everyone you know.
I see two ways this could go: One, by using a short easy to remember domain where everyone creates an account for example BillParker.Call.Me would hit a service that returns a phone number which can in turned be dialed by the mobile device. Two, a new RFC could be written adding essentially another record type much like our current MX records used by SMTP servers. This would then be an open standard by which anyone could build upon it and host phone directories.
Complications: Getting mobile devices able to make the request and properly handle the return value. I have taken a very brief shoot at this but it is going to require some fancy footwork and code on a mobile operating system. This I do not posses the skills for, so again, I hand this idea out to the world. Please feel free to contact me via posting a comment on this page if you would like to discuss this further.