Tantek muses on contact information. One of my coding dreams has always been to sit down for a few months and write the perfect contact manager. I daydream about it sometimes and have a lot of the implementation worked out in my head. Imagine something like Plaxo, but distributed, not annoying, completely automatic, and with an infinitely flexible versioned backend. In fact, not like Plaxo at all.
Heh, I’ve been having a very smiliar dream for about a decade now. I have actually started a couple of times, in different enviroments. I started writing something in PowerScript, using SQL and ODBC, back in 2000. Lately, I’ve been playing around with a XML based markup language that would function as database, and that could be translated to various formats and interfaces via XSLT and XUL. I’d say it’s about 1% done and 99% dream.
I read this post a few hours ago and the idea just kept floating around. I’d like to hear more about your implementation ideas. I was thinking maybe the Jabber protocols could be extended to support this kind of thing, but I was wondering how the data should be synchronized, and how data for people who are not on the network themselves can be stored while also preventing the system from misuse.
When I was at Berklee College of Music, Kenwood Dennard told me that when he got his first gig with Dizzy Gillespie it was just a trio backing Dizzy up. Kenwood followed his instincts and locked in with the bass player. Dizzy got pissed off and told Kenwood “If you’re gonna do what he’s doing then I don’t have a trio, I have a duo and then why am I paying you?”
Not a direct quote, but I thought you might like the anecdote. Thanks for wordpress.