I want one contact list to reference everyone in my social graph. Is that too much to ask?
Enterprises realize benefits from unified contacts
One of the biggest new areas in enterprise these days is unified communications. These UC systems integrate IM, Mail, Voice, and Video into one unified client. My current company, Cisco, is a leader in this area and you can see an example of their UC client here
The main point here is, rather than have an IM contact id, e-mail contact id, and phone number, your contact can be represented by exactly what he/she is, ONE person. With UC, you can now select how you want to communicate with this person. This in turn eases collaboration within an organization.
Internet service aggregation clients bridge part of the gap
Since IM clients and social networks cannot speak with each other, users are forced to log in to each service individually. This can be a pain if you and your friends belong to a bunch of different services.
Several products are now aggregating your online identity. Adium is an IM client on the Mac that has been doing this for years. It allows you to see contact from AOL, Gmail, Yahoo Chat, etc.. all in one client. FriendFeed is a newcomer that lets you get output from feeds for all you favorite internet services (Facebook, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Pandora).
With these services, users no longer have to log into a bunch of different services to access their distributed contacts.
Digsby takes things a step forward
The new client Disby allows a user to login to E-mail, IM Clients, and Social Networks at the same time. It provides mail notification, IM chats, and status updates in a unified interface. One feature I am most impressed with is the ability to combine contacts (Trillian also allows this) from the same person. For instance, if I have a contact Annie, who is my friend on both AOL and Gchat, I can combine them so Annie’s name only shows up once in my contact list.
Why not Find, Combine, and Sync all my Contacts?
Why should I have to tell these services what contacts are the same person? Since, they have access to my services and social graphs, they should be able to mine data from them. With this data, most of the possible merges can be inferred. In fact, most of my friends’ screen names are similar enough that screen name data alone should be enough. A CEO of a popular Silicon Valley web 2.0 start-up informed me Tuesday that several new companies are trying crack this problem using existing graphs from services such as FriendFeed.
Does anyone know of any promising entrants in this area?
