My address changes when I move. My phone number changes when I swap phones. My email address changes when I get buried in spam. But my name never changes — so it’s the perfect contact address.

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. From PC World:

Forget phone numbers and e-mail addresses. The era of the Internet handle is emerging.

Instead of having to remember a phone number or an e-mail address, in a few short years we might simply find somebody remotely over the Internet via his or her handle, another word for an Internet nickname.

It would be similar to the way handles are used in instant messaging or Skype, except that the handle would apply to all modes of getting in touch, including a phone number or e-mail address (or several of each). In my case, my Skype handle, “MattaboyBoston,” could become the way you would reach me.

“People will no longer seek each other’s phone numbers or email address[es] when establishing personal or working relationships,” wrote Gartner analyst Adib Ghubril in a report on mobile predictions for 2012 and beyond. “Instead, they will ask each other, ‘What’s your handle?’ ”

Ghubril said that handles will have a huge advantage. They could remain unchanged for a long time, if not for life.

The idea is simply indirect addressing: If I depend on your physical address (or your phone number or email address), when you make a change, I am lost. But if I use an indirect addressing scheme — I address you by name, or by “handle” as this article avers — then the indirect address can always accurately reflect your current contact information, even if you change it twelve times a day.

The responsibility for maintaining accurate contact information moves from dozens or thousands of distracted and loosely motivated people to the one person most strongly motivated to make sure your messages get through — you.

As with all predictions, the ideas discussed in the PC World article are kludgy and stoopid. This all will actually happen as a beneficial side-effect of cloud-based data storage. We talked about this over the summer in discussions of a hypothetical CRM called Heidi:

An email comes in over the transom. The spambot says it’s not spam and the sender is not already in your CRM database, so let’s extract as much information as we can from the email. With a name and an email address we can probably get the sender’s full contact information, and possibly a whole lot more.

Make that first contact a phone call instead. Caller ID is lame, but Google is not. From the phone number, can you get back to a name? A location? From those, can we effect the same kind of searches discussed above?

There’s more: Once your CRM knows a name, it should be watching for any changes in publicly-available databases that should be reflected in your private CRM database. That is to say, your CRM should be maintaining itself.

All of this will happen. Probably not as slick as I can imagine things, but faster than you think it will.