| That's why my dream contact platform would feature client side encryption. We should have a bitwarden/lastpass/1password for contacts, that synchronizes it across my services and devices, with a solid API + permission scheme to share with other apps. I currently have at least 6 places where my contacts are stored (should I say scattered). I have no way to search them all, tag them all, archive the ones I seldom need, have versioning of the various data, etc. Besides, contacts are a very broad topic. I have contacts for friend and families, I have girls I'm flirting with, I have clients, I have administration offices, hair cutters, providers, restaurants... For some of them I want a way to contact them, some of them the location, some I don't want to appear in the main listing, some I want to explicitly hide from people peeking at my phones, some I want to easily share or even synchronize with others. And then there is the way things are labelled. When going networking, I will collect many contacts I want to isolate. I want to be able to search them from a "known from" fields, or a "industry" tag. I want to make groups to mass communicate: I organize parties and sport events, and the best way to get people on board is still direct texting, and optional calling: fb events don't cut it. It's one of those simple topics that aren't solve. There is still no simple way to just send files from any computer to another. Try telling your mum to send you this videos from their iPhone to your laptop now that the wifi is down. Or share 3Go of photos with this group of 20 persons you just met on a trip. There is still no simple way to make check lists (not to do list, mind you, there are plenty of those). Having a personal archive of documents and notes sucks. Best effort used to be Evernote and MS one note. Proprietary plateform and standards, lock ins and of course they access your stuff. Noting stuff on the way is hacking. I use telegram self-messaging for that because it let me quickly write, film, record stuff and queue them in a thread that sync accross my devices. And contacts are still a mess. Once in a while, you receive the "I changed my phone/lost my contacts/new email/made a mistake" text asking "who is this ?". I still note metadata in the "name" field of contact to remember where I know the person from, or the name of their children to avoid being awkward when meeting them again. Still we have an amazing free map of the entire world, more quality video content we can ever consume and encyclopedic knowledge of my entire field of expertise at my fingertip. The way computer evolved is weird. |
The way computer evolved is weird. "
To some extent, that's understandable. Storing and accessing static objective information that is the same for every user, that's easy, in a way it's just a matter of bandwidth and storage space.
Personal information and personal workflows, that is a different matter entirely.