Will Facebook kill phone numbers?

According to the latest statistics, Facebook has up to 1.01 billion daily active users and 894 million mobile daily active users on average, in which approximately 83.5 percent are outside the US and Canada. In relation to Messenger, it recently announced that photo sharing in the feature was growing at a fast rate with over 9.5 billion photos sent each month alone.The report predicts that disappearance of the phone number will be one of 2016 trends as old communication styles are disappearing."SMS and texting came to the fore in the time of flip phones. Now, many of us can do so much more on our phones; we went from just making phone calls and sending basic text-only messages to having computers in our pockets. And just like the flip phone is disappearing, old communication styles are disappearing too," according to Facebook VP of messaging products David Marcus. Facebook Messenger, which has crossed the milestone of 800 million users each month, enables users to send more than just text, according to Marcus. 
"You can also send stickers, photos, videos, voice clips, GIFs, your location and money to people. You can make video and voice calls while at the same time not needing to know someone’s phone number," Marcus notes in the report, adding that users no longer needed to have a Facebook account to use Messenger.Another interesting trend predicted by Facebook is that interaction will happen more and more in Messenger threads as a result of a paradigm shift in how people engage."It's so much easier to do everything in one place that has the context of your last interactions, as well as your identity no need to ever login rather than downloading apps that you’ll never use again and jumping around from one app to another," said Marcus.Facebook also announced its latest innovation called M, a digital virtual assistant powered by human-trained artificial intelligence. "It’s still very, very early days, but the growing AI capabilities are bringing unparalleled convenience to simple, every day tasks like booking a restaurant, sending flowers and making plans," said Marcus 

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