Open Contacts and distributed social networking, Part 1

While I recognize the values of existing social networking web sites, I think distributed social networking can be a very good complementation or an alternative solution to some groups of people.

In my blog

Is Web 2.0 Address Book a silver bullet?

I discussed what an ideal address book could be and the difficulty of designing such program. However, I think Open Contacts as a desktop program has a good potential of playing part of distributed social networking.

I respect that you have freedom of choosing whether to use the Internet or the desktop as you premium/primary/central persistent storage of your contact information.

Just summarize here the platforms that store you contact info:

1. Paper and business cards
2. PC
3. PDA and mobile phone
4. Web

Different people might have different dependencies to these platforms, have different preferences and use cases from time to time.


The Internet as primary storage
For some groups of people, especially those with most contacts who are contactable through the internet, they will prefer the internet as the primary storage. Integrated with Web mail and Web base IM as well as other web based applications, they can have most communications done. And an integrated service can provide comprehensive logs for all of these activities.

In addition, with mobile phones supporting Web capability, you can even sync your phone logs to the integrated service. Though I don't have any insider news, I am quite sure Google is going to do it.

Though land line phones has been becoming less significant, it is good to include land line phone in the contact log. It should be easy to involve IP phone which was born of the Internet. To involve traditional land line phones, there might be some hassles with those telecom operators.

So, basically you can use computers anywhere with internet connection, to do all your electronic contact management:

1. Edit and lookup contact info. This is basic thing.
2. Send Web Email and check Email logs.
3. Start Web base IM, and check IM logs.
4. Sync selected contacts with mobile phones, through PC port or Web.
5. Sync selected contacts with some programs that you have to use at work.
6. Print selected contacts to papers. Sometimes you still need a hard copy, as least for insurance of data reliability.
7. Update contacts through some automatic ways, for example, importing from other data sources.
   
8. Utilizing social networking.
9. Do birthday management, and any other activity that need contact info.

The Web will be the only place you need to live in for computing, and you just need PDA/mobile as handy data access points, and might need a memory chip/CR-R for some private backup if desired. You will enjoy the freedom of Web only life, without any constraint by a specific PC. You do not need a Personal Computer.

PDA as primary storage

PDA is handy, but not an adequate platform to manage large amount of contact data due to the sizes of screen and input devices, I regard. However, I am sure there are a lot people around using PDA as primary contact manager. In some cases, they can do almost everything with PDA as the only computing platform, without the need of using PC. They can backup data to PC, Web, flash drive or any other external storage.

I can even foreseen such trend: PDA can connect to a wireless keyboard, a wireless mouse, and a wired big monitor (as I am not aware that there exist a wireless monitor yet). Then a PDA can become like a PC, when it needs to.

Actually, the line between PC and "pocket PC" is becoming deem. A bit off topic now.

The PC as primary storage

Though I am not old enough to see the first day when computer came out of labs, I am sure that at those days people started to use computer to store contact info, and since the early day when PC was getting popular, there have been tens of thousands of personal address book programs around. The trend is, the program and the database have been moving to the internet/Web, since the first Web mail program came out.

However, for large majority of computer users, PC is still the primary platform of computing, and contact info has to be integrated with those applications (either desktop, LAN or the Internet) running on PC. These users will mostly choose between PC desktop or the Web.

A desktop application still have some advantages comparing with the counterpart of the Web. A desktop application can freely access local resource, and Web applications are limited to many local resources due to security concern. Thus, web applications can hardly interact with non-Web applications with some exceptions (for example, interacting with Email programs, Skype or others with some pre-arrangements), while desktop applications can freely communicate with the Web services as long as the services providers publish adequate protocols or APIs.

For many users, the availability of PC is more reliable than the availability of the Internet. So, even if nowadays Web applications have been becoming more like a desktop program, these users will still choose PC as primary platform. Desktop programs mostly are faster and more reliable than web counterparts which inevitably suffer from network traffic and server down/busy time.

This is what I am going to discuss in the 2nd part of the article, about the role of Open Contacts.