Has the cell phone directory replace the phone book?

It’s that time of year again. No, not spring cleaning. It’s time for those strangers to show up at your door bearing large gifts...the new phone books. As I went to replace my old phone book with the new one, I wondered if I had ever used the phone book in the last year. Are phone books the thing of the past? Phone book companies are finding their customers don’t want a big heavy book taking up space in their home. Also, phone books are only updated once a year so many numbers listed are obsolete. If someone moves as much as the average 18-28 year old, there would be a new number every year to track. To combat these issues, phone book companies have put their books online, and are sending out their books on a cd-rom disc instead of a printed book in many neighborhoods. These are great ideas, however, phone books only list land-lines, not cell phone numbers. More and more Americans are dropping their land-lines and only having a cell phone. This is leading to a huge new market on the world wide web: cell phone directories.

There are many on the web these days, some free, some you pay for. A simple search in a search engine will bring up more options than you thought possible. You can search for someone’s number, or if you have a call from someone you don’t know, you can do a reverse search and find out the person’s name. For a larger price, you can get someone’s address, their employment history, their financial data and much more. All with just a click of the mouse. With all of this new technology, prank calling could be a thing of the past! The cell phone directory allows users to lookup any cell phone number and some cell phone directories make an attempt to lookup both.

Our cell phone directory falls into the category of free cell phone directory, because we attempt to lookup the cell phone number for free.