There’s been a lot of improvement in communications in the past few years, from better services to brand new ones, but I still feel like contact management is lagging behind. I mean, isn’t it important to be able to find how to contact somebody in the first place?

Here are a few things I think could be better.

People have a lot of email addresses

With all the storage space provided by modern email services, and philosophies like GMail’s that advocate not deleting your email, you may have pretty old messages in your account. For instance, mine goes back to 1999 (and sometimes I wish I had thought about keeping my email before then because it’s fun to read those old conversations). This means some of your friends and coworkers may have changed jobs and personal email providers a few times. Some of my contacts have up to a dozen email addresses, actually.

Yahoo! Mail and GMail offer a dynamic list of email addresses where you can add as many as you want for a person, which is good, but Live Mail only gives you a static list of “home”, “work”, “IM” and “other”, which sucks. GMail lets you describe each address as “home”, “work” or “other”, but suprisingly doesn’t let you define custom descriptions. Yahoo! Mail doesn’t have descriptions so you have to guess which goes where.

One thing missing in all 3 services, and that I strongly wished existed, is the ability to tag specific addresses as “deprecated”: if one of your friends isn’t using that old AOL address anymore, you don’t want it ever suggested to you when you compose a  new message. However, you still want this address to be in the system for when you search old conversations with that contact.

Identity Profiles

Going beyond all this, I sometimes wish email providers would evolve from the old contact model of “name/email/address/notes” probably defined in the early days of Lotus Notes or something. The same way OpenID or InfoCard have “identity profiles”, each with its own set of contact information (name, email, address, website, etc.), contact management could also feature such profiles.

“Work” and “Home” profiles would be the most obvious ones, and would let the user tie together a set of previously unrelated information: right now, contacts may have email addresses for work and home, and IM nicknames for work and home, but they’re in separate lists, with no way to tie them together. Besides, as far as I can tell, no email provider even offers the ability to tag an IM nickname as being for “work” or “home” anyway.

The identity profile paradigm could then be used in powerful ways by client applications. For instance, the “work” profile would be the first suggestion on weekdays between 9am and 5pm, but the “home” profile would take over on week-ends and week-day evenings.

Don’t notify, just change

You probably know how much of a pain it is to notify everyone you know that you have a new email address, home address, and/or phone number. In this age of feeds and automatic updates, it’s weird that there’s no fancy technology with a hard to pronounce name that would do just that. Still, several people like Douglas Purdy or Tim Bray have been thinking about something like the following for a year or two now (that’s a lot in internet age!), on which I expand a bit.

The idea would be to use something like the hCard standard, a combine it with some RSS or PubSubHubbub magic: people who want to contact you would pull or get pushed your information instead of storing a completely different (and possibly out-of-date) version in their address book. Since the information is defined by you (via your email provider, your own server, or some 3rd party like for OpenID), it’s always up to date. You only have to change it once in one place and everybody else uses the updated version from then on.

It would especially be awesome if that kind of technology was used by governments, banks, ISPs, phone and cable operators, and all those guys that you always have to write to whenever you move.

Also, if coupled with identity profiles, you could have scenarios where somebody going away on holidays would update his information by making his “on the move” profile the main one, and all the other ones (especially the “work” one) disabled temporarily. If the whole system is correctly designed, this would let us avoid those awful “Sorry, I’m in Hawaii until next month” emails, because the client application would already know all this before you send anything. It would also ideally work not only with email but other protocols as well (IM, etc.).

Clever guy needed

That’s pretty much it. Now I just need a clever guy to make this happen because, well, like most programmers, I’m lazy. Besides, somebody probably had all those ideas and more, already. Still, I’d like my GMail inbox to get better.

Update: my personal website has, since this article, been redesigned and does not feature this technique anymore. The demo page is still available however. It was broken for a while, but should be working again now.

I recently published the new version of my personal website and you’ll have no problem figuring out that I had some fun with jQuery. Probably a bit too much fun, actually, but hey, a personal website is supposed to be just usable enough that you can contact the owner without hassle.

My first approach to the website was a mix of good practices and totally blasphemous process:

• I wanted a simple website that only lists ways to get in touch with me (Facebook, LinkedIn, and all that social web stuff), and ways to follow what I’m doing online (my blogs, twitter updates, and all that other social web stuff). It would additionally have a contact form so that people could send me a quick message without any extra steps.
• I also wanted a website with some funky jQuery shit going on. I wanted to learn the API along with vanilla Javascript.

After some research about what jQuery can and cannot do, and a few sketches on my trusted notebook, I came up with a totally revolutionary (in the post-Web 2.0/post-iPhone 21st century definition of the term¹) idea: the vertical “Coda” slider!

This UI pattern has been popularized by Panic’s website for their Coda software. It features a panel in which pages slide in and out when you click on their title, displayed in some kind of list or menu bar. There’s a nice tutorial on “jQuery for designers” that explains how to reimplement it. The only difference is that I wanted the pages to slide in and out vertically instead of horizontally. You may point out that the aformentioned tutorial features an option to do just that, but it’s not quite the way I wanted. I want it to look like a standard page until you click one of the navigation links, which is when it goes “shwoop” and you go “wow I did not expect that!”.

No need to go through a lengthy tutorial, as you can probably figure how it works by just looking at the code, but still, to make it easier on you I created a “demo” version of the page with placeholder content and none of the other bouncy crap going on. Go check it out if you want to steal some of it, although I still have a couple of little quirks to fix, especially with window resizing.