Earlier this year, I attended a conference where I saw demos of a
couple of products designed to improve contact management within
Outlook. Afterward, I discussed the demos with two people who had
sat through them and we agreed that, while five years ago we might
have liked these products, today we couldn’t see using
them.
Why? Because all of us had stopped using contacts within Outlook
and had moved our contact management to social networks, like
Facebook and LinkedIn.
For me, this has been useful. Now, when I meet someone, instead of
having to take his business card and enter it into a system at a
future date (if I ever get to it), I would add that person as a
friend in Facebook or to my network in LinkedIn. When I need to
make contact down the road, I know I can find him, and I’ll
know that all of his information is up-to-date.
This solves lots of problems. No longer do I need to wonder if I
still have the correct phone number, or email address or if the
person even still works at the same company. Now I know what the
person’s current situation is and I can even contact him
directly through the social network’s messaging or chat
system.
This has worked well. But when I saw Facebook’s recent
announcement about its planned messaging service, even more
powerful uses for these networks occurred to me.
To be clear, what Facebook is announcing is basic and, while
potentially useful, it will not revolutionize anything at the
moment. But the future potential could be big. I see the potential
for a system to become the single point of contact for reaching
people, no matter where they are and what means of communication
they have.
Think of it like this. You need to contact your friend Joe right
away. What do you do? Call or SMS his cell phone? Email him? See if
he is available on IM? Maybe you’ll reach him, maybe not. Now
imagine you simply click a Contact Joe icon in a social network or
application. It knows how to reach Joe via phone, SMS, chat, email,
or social network messaging system and is smart enough to use the
most method most likely to succeed.
With a system like this, you can get hold of people without having
to access all of their numbers, chat handles and email addresses;
you just say "contact Joe." Of course, as with anything, there are
potential gotchas. First, the announced Facebook system
doesn’t have this capability, and if it did (or eventually
does), Facebook’s track record in privacy and covert feature
changes would probably make many wary of fully committing to the
system.
But a system like this doesn’t need to come from Facebook.
With the wide availability of APIs for communication systems, many
companies could build a similar system. In fact, Google, with
Google Voice and Gmail, is closer to providing this type of
functionality than Facebook is (without the key feature of the
social network).
Still, whoever comes up with a system like this will have a
potential customer in me.