Dylan Greene dot com

Part 1 - Community and Contacts

One of the important concepts of Web 2.0 is community. The problem is that there is no method to integrate all of the Web 2.0 communities we now belong to.

When I meet somebody I want to keep in contact with I need to add their contact info to most of the these systems:

1. Outlook Contacts for email.
2. MSN Instant Messenger for IM.
3. GoogleTalk if they don't MSN IM.
4. Skype if they don't use MSN or Gtalk (AIM is for kids!).
5. LinkedIn for business contacts.
6. Cell phone for calling on the go and knowing who's calling me.
7. MySpace if I want to pretend to be hip.
8. XBOX Live Friends List if the person is a gamer.
9. Subscribe to their blog if they have a blog worth subscribing to.
10. And if I wanted to do this right... add this person as a friend on TagWorld, Flappr, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Consumating, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Tagworld, and a dozen others I'm forgetting or leaving off on purpose...

Web 2.0 was supposed to make my life better! Now I spend more time managing my friends and contacts than talking to them. Half the people in my Web 2.0 communities I no longer remember who they are or why I added them. The problem is that we have too many collections of contacts to manage and they communities are not working together.

The Web 3.0 Fix:

One community system to rule them all!

I envision a decentralized contact storage network for storing our contacts. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and small companies would all offer this as a free service. Use the one you trust the most, with the best UI, or run your own service, it doesn't matter.

For each contact we describe how we know that person [friend, co-worker, family, customer, school, common interests, met at conference, etc] and who can see them [just friends, just co-workers, everyone, nobody, etc].

You choose which services can see your contacts, and what types of contacts they can see. Maybe you don't want the people you MySpace just because they had a nice photo listed as business contacts on LinkedIn.

Some cool benefits:

1. One place to add and store our contacts.
2. When we get an email from somebody we don't recognize, our email programs will inform us how we know that person using information from LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of our others services.
3. When joining a new service, instantly add contacts instead of manually finding them again.
4. Services without communities could use this to add community features without more work for the users. For example, Amazon could show recommended books based on what your friends are buying.

Who is building this?

As far as I know, nobody is. If you know otherwise, let me know!

With all of the hype behind Web 2.0, my hope that people aren't thinking this is the answer, the end game, the best that we can do. This part one of a six-part series. I will describe problems with Web 2.0 and how they can be fixed. Look forward to radical new ideas, insider interviews, and heavy usage of bulleted lists.

- dylan