That aside, reasonable men can come to different conclusions with equal validity, IMHO, about whether numbers or URIs are primary in the future. Some people argue that we will all have a master-number and that’s what we give out and from that number we can be contacted via phone, IM, email, web page, whatever.

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-DNS+SRV" rel=”nofollow”>http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-DNS+SRV

I don’t find it entirely crazy to extend the semantic meaning of user@somedomain.com to one’s global communication ID.

Actually, I framed my question incorrectly. We still want to bridge regular phone systems with VoIP so phone numbers would be useful.

I actually meant to contrast e-mail addresses with cryptic SIP phone numbers.

Instead of giving someone:

1) my phone number
2) my email address
3) my SIP address

i could instead only give them 1) and 2). If they plug 2) in a SIP device, it could try to ring me up by looking-up a SIP host that would know about my username for my domain, and contacting me thru it, if I’m not there, it could capture a voicemail audio clip from me and e-mail a .wav file to me over SMTP via another host it’d have looked-up thru an MX record.

I could however see how people would want to dissociate their SIP access from their e-mail access, but even then, chrisholland@somedifferentSIPonlyISP.com would seem easier to remember than a sip address?