It isn’t the complete answer, but it is a step in the right direction.

If you combine that with what we are doing at phonefromhere.com, you may never need to deal with digits again.

A combination of presense driven dynamic DNS, search, and URIs and browser embedded phones may break the digital shackles.

Besides, the easy way to do this anyway would be to beam the number, along with name, email address, etc. directly onto one’s phone or PDA via Bluetooth. Once you do that, again, who cares about the number; it’s in your address book associated with their name.

For small groups of people, sure, dial-by-name works great. If you’ve worked at an office with dial-by-name and multiple “Chris Smiths,” it doesn’t seem quite as great. IM nicknames and email addresses based on real names quickly devolve into alphanumeric combinations of “name1234″ and that like. Nor does it seem so amazing if it’s a name that you’ve heard but can’t remember how to spell, either; you still end up having them spell it out letter-by-letter or write it down.

It’s probably slightly better to have alphanumerics, but people still tend to keep address books for their email, buddy lists for their IM friends, and bookmarks for their webpages, just as they keep phone lists. Once you’re forced to have an address book, it’s close to the same whether it’s numeric or alphanumeric.

Search engines turn the entire content of web sites into keyword alternatives for domain names, so why not allow callers to associate key word tags with their directory listing?

Can you guarantee that your personal website is going to be the number one hit on the search engine? That it won’t change as other people add new keywords? That you won’t have to look at the results more closely to determine which one is the one you want? I have two friends named James Kao that were presidents of anime clubs in college; one was president of the anime club at Duke where I was an undergrad, one was president of the anime club at Cornell where I was a grad student. I can only imagine that it’s worse for more common names.

Adding keywords to phone directory listings is good idea, but that’s still a difference in degree, not kind, when compared with existing directories. I certainly don’t want to search through a directory every single time I want to call someone; I’m going to put it in an address book. Search by name in a directory to get a telephone number and put it in an address book is not that different from search by name in a directory to get an alphanumeric that I then put in an address book.

Exchange keywords rather than telephone numbers with someone at a party or business meeting.

Would this really be that useful? For me, I get the number at a party or meeting, immediately put it in my phone’s list of numbers, and then it’s effectively dial-by-name for me from then out. Why do I want keywords so that I can go home, run those keywords and the name (assuming I remember how to spell it) into a search engine, and then look through the hits to make sure that I have the right person before adding them? I’ll take instantly having the way to connect to them that I can test right now by calling them while still at the party or meeting, thanks.

It takes as long as it does due to 911 mapping to your phone number so they know where to go when you call them.

[How did the operator know where your mom was? Had she been listening to those conversations?]