Timothy Post.com

Tim O’Reilly wrote a very interesting blog post regarding a favorite topic of mine- Address Book 2.0. Here’s Tim’s original blog post titled Social Network Fatigue and the Missing Web 2.0 Address Book.

And here’s my response to Tim in the Comments:

Address Book 1.0:

The purpose is to capture data about people and organizations with whom we have relationships. While this purpose is fine, it is also limited. We now have relationships with things, places, brands, etc.

When trying to capture data about these new “records” we are often forced to create new fields. Unfortunately, we quickly start to create some many unique data fields that the database (i.e. address book) becomes unwieldy.

Not to mention the fact that the very act of inputting data into these hundreds of unique data fields becomes prohibitive.

What’s the answer? I believe that we need to reverse the model and put the data maintenance back on the counter party in our relationships.

When I open an account at Hertz Rental Car there are a number of data fields that are custom to the relationship of rental car companies to its customers (e.g. type of car preferred, cities one normally rents from, credit card data on file, etc).

Were I to try to create custom fields in my MS Outlook or Mac Address Book these unique rental car company fields would not be common to any other records in that database.

The solution is for Hertz rental car company to package all of this unique data into a web widget (HTML, Javascript, or Flash () and make that widget available to me to save in my address book 2.0.

We have relationships with thousands of companies, brands, people, services, etc for which we are not presently able to save.

Take, as an example, all the restaurants you have visited in the past 30 days. Do you have custom records for every single restaurant? Probably not. Do you even have the basic contact info for these restaurants? Maybe, but it is sure a royal pain in the neck to grab the business card and then input that information into your address book 1.0.

Plus, even if you are meticulous and maintain data about these culinary relationships, chances are that these data records are pretty one-dimensional. Do you list you favorite waiter, table, time to eat, day of the week, favorite appetizer, main dish, etc? Probably not but maybe in the notes. It’s sloppy and a huge chore to maintain.

What if instead, the restaurant were to design that data records and create all the fields it thought were important. You could go to the website of that restaurant, create an account, populate that account with data about the relationship, and then package all that information into a web widget which you could save in your address book 2.0 (currently most widgets are cut and paste but there are some one-click solutions).

The “beauty” of this new distributed address book would be that EVERY data records would be unique. An impossibility with current address books.

How would you find stuff? Why not Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine (CSE). Each widget would point to a unique URL (the URL for your account with the other party) which Google CSE could search. Your search engine would only search the URLs for your own Address Book.

When you did a general web wide search there might be an Google Ads which would offer widgets. Say you were looking for do some research on hotels in Rome. Do your Google search and copy/paste the widgets for ROme hotels into your address book. The data would already be entered.

Even better is that the hotels themselves could update those widgets in real time. Widgets pull data from the hotels database. The hotel could have real time prices customized to the location of the viewer (they know through the IP address).

In terms of aggregating all your current social networks, each would offer you the ability to create widgets for each relationship on that network. I could “import” (copy/paste or one-click) widgets for all those people on Facebook or MySpace or My Blog Log whom I wanted in my Address Book 2.0

Once these data record widgets are in my address book they pull data from that person’s account/page on the social network. I would NOT need to do any data cleansing or maintenance myself. The person would be responsible for keeping their own data up to date.

The maker of the address book would offer tools for creating an aggregate page for those relationships where the other party has multiple widgets.

So, Tim I think that with developments in web widgets Address Book 2.0 might just become a reality.

Thanks, Tim Post

// 02.12.2007 at 1:01 pm // Tagged Uncategorized