Contacts, what about contacts?

I have so much to say about this, I will probably split it into multiple posts.

I have been looking for a while, there is nothing I can find out there (meaning free on the web) I can find that satisfies my requirements for contact management. I suppose the problem might be in the requirements themselves, but we have so many applications already available, project management, to do lists, blogs, calendars, web sites. It just seem like a big hole in the breath of applications currently available.

I tried Airset for a while, it was ok if a bit slow to my liking. But mainly it is just a list of contacts and addresses. What else to expect you might say, is that not what contact management is? Well, that is a necessary start for sure. Here are the weird ideas I came up with.

• Privacy is a big one, how can I share my contacts with family and friends and not with the rest of the world? At the moment, anything you put on-line can be used to know you better, sell you more targeted stuff and that leaves out the fact that you are putting other people's information on-line. Small little fact they might not be happy about if they understood all the implications.


• I would like to start being able to enter some facts about all my contacts. My memory is awful and I need all the help I can get. I suppose I could treat my contacts as sales opportunity and use salesforce.com but I am pretty sure this is not what I had in mind.


• I want to be able to rate my contacts, there are people I really like I would want to be able to make sure I don't forget to stay in touch. I want something to tell me: 'Hey you really like that guy! You have not talked to him for a while, invite him over for a beer or go and have lunch with him'.


• If I am going to rate my contacts, I probably want the ability to share some information but not all. It needs to be tailored to whom, what type of people they are, family, close friends, etc. Also probably depends on the type of comments. I don't really want to tell some of my friends that other guy does not really like them.


• Of course you want to start linking your friends together, potentially this is a way of sharing information. you could say A is a close friend of mine and a good friend of B. So anything I say about A should probably be shared with B. I would also want to rate the relationship of course. A is a very good friend of mine, so it B but they don't really like each other. So I shouldn't probably share my observations. I can see how it could lead to a dashboard of gossips your friends could participate in to help you know your people better. Oh my god, did I just talked myself into micro-blogging?


• Now, I really want to add the social graph aspect to it. I want my contact management system to understand flickr Facebook, My Space and blogger and potentially alert me when there are changes. Not sure how much though, I still need to be sold on micro-blogging. I want to be able to search about my friends and learn anything I can about them from the web as well. The Google graph API might be a good place to start there.


• Of course this is really personal information, I want access to this information everywhere, on-line (maybe, but only with long term guarantees the data is mine), in outlook, gmail, ipod, mobile phone and regular home phone (yes I have one of those).


• Once you have that, of course this is only the beginning. This would be the base for everything else I do. Birthdays and contact points can go to my calendars. Schedules with people I work with and projects we need to work on together. I can assign competencies to people and when I have an question, I can go and see their blogs. I want to be able to define trusted source of information (whether a real contact of mine or not) for specific topics. Don't ask me anything about gardening and especially don't trust anything I might volunteer in that area.


• I especially like the application for search, wouldn't it be nice if my search results were sorted based on the articles published by people you trust in those areas. Not sure that is ever going to happen. Would I ever be confortable entrusting Google with that much information about myself and my contacts.

I suppose this is why I am still waiting for the right tool, nothing I have looked at comes close to this at this point. If there is one, please make sure to point it out.
Anyway, that is it for now.