There are some messengers who use emails, other who use a username or a account name, other messengers use phone numbers or mobile numbers, but what about to make a kontalk use them all.
For example why not find your old friend in the town you moved from if you still remember his street and zip code?
Or you remember his myspace id, or his skype? if the entry is in the address book it should help find the person.
I think the goal is to find the person you desire to communicate with.
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Reasonable argumantation, but I doubt it’s going to be implemented, for one reason.
To enhace the user’s privacy, instead of saving the user’s phone numbers on server side, Kontalk saves their hashes* and every once you update your contact list, it creates a hash in the same way how the numbers are saved and compares whether there are matches with the server’s list.
While nasically the same thing can be applied to any other data, such as plain text of any kind, it’s an ineffecient process and will become unhandy.
However I think that I’ve read something about making this process more effecitent on GitHub recently, so let’s wait what @daniele_athome says about that.
Also it seems kinda strange to have sbd. in one’s own contacts with an old nickname that the other person cared about to fill in the personal data but not own their current phone number.
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IMO it’s not a good idea to use all this data in a network which should save privacy.
If you only have the postal address maybe there is a reason for this 
I have schoolmates I hope they never contact me 
In this case the normal way would be to send e.g a Christmas postcard with your mail adress or phone number. If your old forgotten friend would like to stay in contact with you, he/she will write or call you.
An the next step could be Kontalk…
I hope you understand me.
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@webratte, that’s a good point. Thinking of that the potential impementation should let the user chose which ways they should be found through.
Dear friends, I am very glad that you participated to the debate. Of course each user should be able to choose by what data he shall be found. If you do not want to be found by your snake mail address you do not supply it.
if you want to supply only phone number, You should have that option.
But lets see it the other way round. The latest Experiments Skype, FB, WA and all other popular messenger have shown us that the user expect such features, and use them actively.
So I think there should be something like that. The great thing is that the data is kept hashed or encrypted and not plain, what is the standard way to keep passwords now-days.
Again, the goal is to find people, and make communication possible.
Somebody who does not want this has the option to not supply more data then his phone number.
@webratte First of all thanks for answering, I can understand your fears, But such experiments like stayfriends studivz xing and others show us that the user is not so paranoical. I would go also some steps more and let the user choose if they want to supply school data or university data or whatever data they want. if you want to meet schoolmates you prolly want to supply such data.
The more user the better.
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I think it’s kind of obvious by now, but I wanted to point out that phone number only should be the default.