KaneBlog

How do you syndicate personal information?

November 8th, 2005

UPDATE NOTE: Not surprisingly, more than one group is working on the concept I described. One of the vCard extensions that I received an email about is Hcard.

Between calls today, I thought about how personal information is still sliced and diced into multiple IM systems, multiple personal pages and difused in other ways. Places like MySpace are an improvement over the narrowly focussed kane.org for sharing information of the personal type with others. However, they are still largely a closed system.

These community and social technology enablers take the first stage of open syndication and content technologies to the next level, but don’t provide an equivalent to RSS to ‘publish’ personal information. I’m thinking of a network friendly, expanded vCard or Plaxo-type technology that lives in the world of open standards and technologies. A single authoritative, but syndicated/published source of the info would solve the issues I have with both the vCard (not universal or auto-updating) and Plaxo (it has to poll each contact with email).

There are good reasons for some folks not to want anyone else to have access to their phone number or email address, but the same restrictions may not apply to bands you like or technologies you think are cool. Some of the inevitable concerns about control over information could be addressed with a federated directory approach.

How about XMLRPC-type access so I can ping the place your personal info lives (if you authorize me) and grab updates to your phone number, favorite bands, blog location, etc.?

Wouldn’t it be great if your Outlook, cell phone or other address book could constantly update your contacts?

And last, wouldn’t it be great if these capabilities could be integrated into the relevant web services that you use?

Entry Filed under: General