NeedNumbers.Me Is Your Last, Best Hope When Your Phone (and Contact List) Dies – if You Use Facebook

I’m not actually sure what to think of this little project called NeedNumbers.Me; it’s quite smart and potentially useful, however, it’s pretty obsolete nowadays with all those smartphones and even dumbphones that have some sort of cloud synchronization, local computer backup and what not.

Let’s say you lose your phone – it gets stolen, droped in the toilet or you simply leave it at the table in a bar. The loss of the phone itself isn’t such a problem (if you don’t have any valuable or compromising photos and/or messages on it), but your contact list is gone. And thankfully to the progress of cell phone industry, we don’t really remember all those numbers – just put in your contacts and it will wait for you there.

I Need the Numbers!

How are you going to get those numbers back? First, you can dig them out of the backup file. You can get them from your Google Contacts or even Facebook Contacts. Sometimes, people who lost their phone will create a Facebook group called “I lost my phone” or something similar, inviting all of their friends in it to leave their cell phone number.

Here’s where NeedNumbers.Me steps in – open it up, connect it with your Facebook account and let the magic begin. NeedNumbers.Me will go through all of your groups and events you’re connected to. You’ll then be able to select your friends, make a list of the ones you wish to ‘restore’ and that’s about it.

Once the data mining is complete, you’ll get a vCard contacts file which you’ll then email to your phone – and easily import all the contacts automatically, opposed to entering each one of them by hand.

Soon to be Dead?

Although NeedNumbers.Me is a useful service (and dare I say – one of the best examples of a minimum viable product), the problem it’s facing is that the non-smartphone users are in decline; with Android devices all over the planet (all over different price ranges), iOS and Windows Phones – there’s a little room left for something else.

Cobmine that with the fact that, no matter how useful NeedNumbers.Me is, it can and it will give you some inaccurate data – not everyone will post their true mobile phone number on Facebook. Finally, a major downside of this application is the fact that it doesn’t prevent an accident, but simply automates the recovery process. And it can’t guarantee 100% accuracy. However, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to get your contacts back, try out NeedNumbers.Me.