At the moment everyone is responsible for maintaining their own list of contacts. Gmail adds the addresses and their name but everything else you have to add yourself (or of course do without).

When Gmail brought in the pictures for contacts I wondered who would get to assert which picture was shown. The person the picture is associated with or the person's account that is being used. Google obviously also thought about this and decided to have both.

This got me thinking surely it would be more efficient if everyone kept their own address / birth date / phone numbers up to date and this data was channeled into their contacts' contact list. In effect the contact list becomes a set of profiles. Now obviously you could keep some fields completely non exchanged (e.g. notes about the person) but for the rest I would think it would be a great improvement.

Yes. I know. There is an issue. Privacy. Just because I emailed someone once it doesn't mean I want them seeing my phone number / date of birth etc. So there would have to be some privacy levels that you would have to group your contacts into. e.g. this person can see all my info, this person can see nothing etc. All the privacy bother may make you think that it is not worth implementing but I think making the contact pages into more like profiles (updated by the person they are about) would be much more efficient.

Thoughts?

nice thought Sam!!
very good one :)
how did you come up with this one?!

where's your pic Sam ? I dont see your pic on your gmail profile :)-

yeah I like this idea Sam, nice one :) It's about time Google made a worthwhile address book (and all the trimmings) attached to GMail.

I can see my pic on that link thing. It is not set to be viewable by everyone though. Sorry!

I remember there was once an email standard for this kind of info exchance... something like Netscape's vCard (?). Whenever someone send this vCard attachment in a Usenet newsgroup he got flamed, IIRC :)

This is basically what Plaxo (plaxo.com) is about. You can set your privacy level to decide who sees what. Of course, all this info resides on Plaxo servers.

Got my vote! I think you should be able to mark the fields public or private. and when you add someone to your contact list it would ask if you would like to share your private fields with them.

yes, but microformats are the next thing that is happening....take a look at
the hcard info here

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/hcard/

Yes but the integration of this sort of thing into *the* web 2.0 email service would be great I think.

ok its "integration" vs "aggreation" that will make the play here..

depends where you are looking for such intergation, its already there at the tehcnorati kitchen space :)-

"We support XOXO for lists and outlines throughout the site, our member's favorite blogs are tagged with xFolk, and plenty of hCard contacts are published in our contact, staff, and profiles pages. We have hCard to vCard and hCalendar to iCalendar converter services so that anyone who publishes their contacts and events on the Web can easily provide "Add to Address Book" and "Add to Calendar" functionality "

Hi Sam,

your idea is a great idea. I've posted it -in a more general way- on http://blogoscoped.com/forum/26819-full.html .

The service could indeed be a kind of networking tool like LinkedIn, CioNet, etc.

Privacy can't be a problem if you can choose who can see your data.

Oh Aggregation. That would be neat too. It would obviously still require integration into the web mail environment. But if Gmail chose a standard (say hCard) and jumped on it getting everyones contact information in that form and getting other peoples contact info coming into your account by the same mechanism... that would be neat.

If a universal standard is established then it could work from Hotmail to Gmail etc too.

Sam, aggreation is happening over RSS and pingarati with , (e.g) Hcard

oh heres another idea..write a harverster for gmail public open contact and if the status is single -send notifiy :)-

"a service that let’s you type in anyone’s Myspace profile and be notified by email if their relationship status changes. It costs $3.95 to sign up for unlimited notifications"

http://singlestat.us/

Yes, I also had this idea some time ago. In the meantime all these social networks came and answered this need. Plaxo (www.plaxo.com) is my current favorite.