Politenessman.net

A unified address book

One of the ‘killer apps’ that should be out there by now is a Unified Address book. I’ve seen rumblings about this on the net, but so far no one seems to have put one together. I’m not sure why.

So what is a unified address book and why is it a killer app? Well how many email and social media accounts do you have? Do you have a cell phone? Do you have a POP or iMAP email account on your computer? I know I do. Each one has its own address book, and how much time have you spent putting addresses into cell phones, importing your address books into social media accounts to see if your friends have signed up etc. When you add it up, it is probably a significant amount of time.

So what does a unified address book do? A unified address book can sync (or is shared) across multiple applications. It can either be hosted on the web (where it will most likely be shared) or it can be hosted on your own PC (where it will most likely work as a sync point)

This is the next application that I am looking out for. I have an iPhone, a Gmail account, a facebook account and five iMAP email accounts, both personal and work. That is at least four address books, and each one had to be created individually. Many of my contacts appear in all of these address books and I have to manually make sure that their information is current and correct in each one. How much easier this would be if it were in one central location that I can either sync with or share across my applications.

So to all you software developers, code monkeys and dabblers out there, quit messing around with some goofy game that no one is going to play for more than a few days, and put together something that will be able to sync my iphone / gmail / facebook / linkedIn / thunderbird address books please, and make it run under linux.

Thanks!