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December 9, 2005
On identity
I have been realising lately that my memory for telephone numbers, addresses, and contact details generally (which is good) hasnt been stressed lately as I rely mostly on the numbers stored in my mobile phone, the address book of my email client etc.
I have been finding that it is a pain to keep all the addresses, emails, phone numbers up to date as there are so many devices/applications that rely on them. Since I am a Microsoft-phobe I dont have the (mis)fortune of relying on Outlook and its suite of memory retention tools.
It would be great if everyone had a domain name or a URL that you could memorise and use that as the universal contact point.
If you type the URL into your phone (or rather select the pre-saved name - who wants to have to remember a URL :) ) or your email client, or your browser the same URL would deliver appropraite information depending on the device used to access the URL.
Accessing with the mobile phone would deliver the mobile number, accessing the URL with your email client would deliver the email address, accessing with a browser (whether your phone, computer, cranial implant, whatever...) would deliver your home page or whatever that might be - flickr stream, blog, podcast, AI Avatar (with respect to Bruce Sterling).
There are two ways to achieve this - have a little webservice sitting at the end of the URL that detects the device and operating mode (ie. mobile phone as phone or browser, computer.device as email client or browser etc...) and send back the appropriate information - so called 'thin client'. The alternative is to have the URL return an XML payload that will have to be parsed by the device to extract the necessary info - so called 'thick client'. This payload can be cached to reduce overheads. Obviously there would need to be some function to check the freshness of the data.
Security would be an issue also, so I would imagine it would be closed rather than open and only allow people access it.
I'm thinking there can be profiles for different people - ie. some people alwasy get shunted to your voice mail instead of your phone etc...
Anyway, now to figure out how to boil the sea...
Posted by dottie at December 9, 2005 2:58 PM