Sometimes I'm very late in getting the latest and greatest. I wait until I can say "I need" something rather than "I want" something. My last cell phone lasted me about 5 years to become the only one on the block with an antenna in its old age. Aww, I loved that phone -- it was so punk rock! A speaker volume so loud that entire city blocks knew I was getting a call. Tough as nails it had been dropped, thrown, slammed, burned, drowned, spit on, knifed (yes, I said knifed), and still worked flawlessly without a single scratch on the screen. Alas, while the iPhone might be a physical pansy compared to my old friend, it was more attractive for the apps to be more productive. So I got an iPhone, gave my old friend a proper burial, and was given a new number and the start of the problem known as "Rick." So who's Rick? That's part of the problem, I don't know. Through my powers of deductive reasoning I can only surmise that he is a jerk face that left me with his number while he is reclined on a yacht drinking fairy beverages out on the pacific somewhere while watching me with his spy satellites and laughing hysterically with two gorgeous babes on his arms as all of his jerk friends call me completely baffled that I'm not Rick!! For the past 6 months, I've received a call asking to speak to Rick between 3 to 15 times a week. I kindly inform the callers that Rick is a jerk face who probably hated them too much to remind them to update their contacts. Perhaps Rick is Mr. Astley and this is his way of saying he's never going to give me up. Maybe I'm being too hard on Rick. After all, I got a new number too and I had to notify all my contacts. The real problem is that we're still using phone numbers -- an identifier invented where teller operated switch boards would use the numbers to drill down to a specific state, city, or neighborhood. The OpenID community thinks URL's are difficult for people to understand! Imagine a series of seemingly random numbers that actually point to locations on a grid. Phone numbers were invented to point to a machine but I want an identifier that will point to me. My phone number is just an attribute to my identity. This would be like trying to find your best friend in a crowded restaurant but you're only able to identify him by what shoes he's wearing. What we really need is an OpenID. If phones were actually "smart" phones capable of taking an OpenID, Rick would not be a jerk. He would have changed his phone number attribute and all of his friends would never know the wiser. Maybe even that luxurious example is missing the mark though. Why bother with phone numbers at all? I mean, when was the last time you went to Google by typing their IP address? What Rick really needs to do is allow his phone service provider to respond on his behalf and the only identity attribute Rick needs to handle is "Current Phone Service Provider". I'm getting ahead of myself, though. This illustrates a subtle point to why URI-based identifiers are so powerful and superior to other identifiers (such as e-mail, imho). Just like the DNS system itself, there are no special guarantees of application support. A registered domain does not necessarily have the ability to respond to website requests through HTTP nor does it necessarily have the ability to respond to SSH, FTP, SMTP, or any other number of applications. It does, however, provide a human-readable identifier that can be used by applications that need to point to that machine. In the context of a web browser, we're informing the application that we expect the domain to be able to respond to HTTP requests. In the context of a mail client, we're informing the application that we expect the domain to be able to respond to SMTP requests. Following that logic through to fruition, I believe my iPhone Contacts application should know that the OpenID I am supplying should be able to respond to HTTP requests following a "Get-Phone-Number" protocol yet to be defined. So Rick, if you're out there and you read this, I understand. It's okay. I forgive you ... you jerk. Technical Note: XRD would actually be the more important technology in the scenario described here. OpenID is not necessarily a requirement to something like this existing but I would imagine some form of identity attribute ownership authentication would be needed.