White pages

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A white pages is a telephone directory listing of subscriber names, addresses, and telephone numbers. In the United States, the term white pages is commonly associated with the residential subscriber listings in the standard directories distributed by the Bell System before divestiture.

White pages can also be an electronic information database, or directory, that contains user names and their associated network addresses, in the manner of a telephone directory. Electronic white pages usually contain additional information, such as office location, phone number, and mailstop, and their contents are governed by a schema.

The best known white pages are 'WhitePages.com' based in Seattle, Washington. The domain whitepages.com was not bought by a large phone company (as it was the case of the domain yellowpages.com) but developed by internet pioneer Alex Algard who was the first one to register it for a few hundred dollars on April 7, 1996. Even though Alex Algard was not a phone company, but a Hobby Internet User he managed to make WhitePages.com one of the, if not the world's most popular Telephone Directory. His wife registered 'WhitePages.ca' which is a Canadian version of Whitepages and which does also exist in the French language. Later WhitePages.com and WhitePages.ca were incorporated into WhitePages.com.