The blogosphere is starting to buzz with speculation about a new platform from Microsoft (News - Alert), code-named “Echoes,” that the company apparently thinks will eventually do away with the need for telephone numbers. The idea is to integrate the functions of mobile phones and e-mail into a single system that enables people to contact one another based on name rather than having to look up and dial a number or type an e-mail address.

 

In a Thursday post, GigaOm blogger Om Malik described Echoes as a services platform for telecom carriers that “combines Microsoft’s Live Messenger with over the air syncing of people’s address books with presence and gift wraps it as a unified communications platform.”

 

The idea of combining various communications methods into one system is hardly new, of course. That’s what the whole “unified communications” revolution is about. Neither is the concept of doing away with phone numbers all that novel; after all, most people who use cellphones rarely dial numbers anymore but instead use built-in address book and/or speed-dial functions. In many cases, once it’s added to an address book, each number becomes irrelevant since call recipients are simply looked up by name.

 

Likewise, with the address book and auto-complete features in e-mail clients like Outlook, most users rarely type a single e-mail address more than once, if even that.

 

Integrating these two systems — mobile phones and e-mail — is what Echoes is all about.

 

In a Thursday post, ZDNet blogger Mary-Jo Foley described how Microsoft plans to pull off this magic. In the first phase of the Echoes roll-out (occurring this summer), the company will introduce a platform that can synchronize contacts from Microsoft Live Messenger with a user’s mobile phone address book.

 

Here’s how Foley said the system will work: Echoes assigns a local mobile number to each Windows live contact and then pushes that contact to any mobile phone without requiring a client. Users can then, directly from their mobile phones, send SMS texts or make calls to the synched contacts without having to dial a number or type an e-mail address.

 

The system goes beyond those basics, however. In her post, Foley noted that “voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user’s PC.” Also, “As the mobile user will always appear ‘online’ to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations will also be able to start from the Widows Live cloud, pushed to the mobile as SMS.”

 

Foley’s information about Echoes, by the way, comes from two sources. One is the transcript of a speech Bill Gates (News - Alert) gave earlier this month in Japan, promoting the concept that Microsoft wants to do away with the need for phone numbers. She also got information from unnamed sources in the know.

 

According to Foley, Echoes is being developed by Microsoft’s Israeli Strategic Development Center.

 

How new or exciting Echoes is, really, depends on your perspective. Malik for one downplayed it in the Thursday GigaOm blog post: “Skype (News - Alert), GrandCentral and others already deliver many of these services. From that perspective there is nothing new here, except for the need of being tied to Microsoft’s platforms.”

 

Watch this space for more news about Echoes as it becomes available.