Take a look at the Smythson address book in the image above. There are only 3 predefined data fields- Name, Address, Telephone. If life were only that easy.
The world in which we live is much more complicated. How many telephone numbers do you have (I have 5)? What about Skype, AIM, MySpace, Facebook? Do you have a blog or a website? How many email addresses do you have? What’s your name in Second Life? How many accounts do you have online? Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Flock, NYT. What about the dozens of User Account pages you have created? The list goes on and on. We are not even including those relationships, affiliations, products, and memberships you maintain offline.
On my trip to Tennessee I created a T-Mobile Hotspots wi-fi account so I could log-in at the Providence Airport and at any random Starbucks in Tennessee (I couldn’t find any), a Boingo account to log-in to wi-fi at the Nashville Airport, a Hilton HHonors card for Hamptons Inn, a Southwest Airlines frequent flyer card, and an Enterprise Rental card. I’m not joking. This isn’t unusual. Each week we initiate dozens of formal and informal relationships.
What’s the solution to managing all this “craziness?” Certainly not a Symthson address book. Or even a MS Outlook Contact Manager. The problem with traditional Contact Managers is that they lack they highly specialized data fields required by each different relationship.
So rather than try to develop a single database for all these thousands of disparate items in our lives, I would suggest that the providers of these various products, services, memberships, etc create the data base records themselves and package it as a web badge.
Each web badge would be like an entry in your Address Book – Contact Manager but better. The web badge would be designed and offered by the counter party in question. For example, Hilton HHonors could send me a web badge which was personalized for me. That web badge would access the Hilton database and would store data about my account. I would not need to copy and paste that account number into my Contact Manager. What about how many points I’ve earned. With the current system I need to log-in to my account to get that info. Why not make that info available via RSS to the actual web badge?
Basically a web badge is a distributed user account. The problem with user accounts is first in getting folks to create them and then trying to get folks to return. DO you have an account with Comcast? How often do you visit it? What if that user account (specifically the data contained there) were wrapped up and delivered to you as a web badge.
The missing piece is a web hosting service that allows you to store, organize, and display those web badges. It is this missing piece which Word of Blog has begun to solve but there is still a lot of ground to cover.
The point of this blog post is to show that web badge are not simply decorative or expressive. Rather, web badges are also a useful tool to help you better organize your life.
There’s a lot more to write on this topic but since there is no comparable service out there it is quite difficult to describe. I know what it looks like in my mind’s eye. More to follow.
