the origin of any communication Part 2
Jörg Land, 12. September 2008
Every Wednesday on this blog, I report on cellity project work so that those of you reading this can get an early preview of what the latest version of cellity Communicator will be like and gain some behind-the-scenes insight on its development. This week I’m writing about: connect
During the design planning phase for this project, we worked on key enhancements for the cellity Communicator. We wanted to take a decisive step forward with what is available, based on communication features already being used successfully. We felt that this next step could only go in the direction of contacts. All communication is based on the contact’s underlying data and this information is usually stored with other address book or phone book entries.
And that is exactly where the problem starts. Simply improving the phonebook wasn’t enough for us, because the phonebook’s fixed structure would remain unchanged. Another dilemma we were confronted with was this: if users didn’t keep their contact data updated themselves, it was only a matter of time before entries would become outdated. On top of that, most contacts were created with only one application in mind (see the ‘convergence’ post I will publish here on October 2). This problem gets even worse due to the contact volatility of a typical user. The following chart demonstrates this clearly:
On the Y axis we can see the number of new contacts per year, with their age shown along the X axis. People gain many new contact after they complete school, whether during their practical on-the-job training, starting studies at the university, studying/staying overseas or when moving to a new city, doing a traineeship or when moving to a new job. I don’t want to make a judgment here about these new contacts, however it is important to all users to securely and systematically save their contacts to an address book.
The example above shows how I archived the contacts I have created over the years. I have some contacts saved in my e-mail software, often this is only the person’s name and e-mail address, which as the years have passed I have kept there while on trips or because I was frustrated by Outlook. Several of my contacts are kept on my cellphone.
Some of these phone numbers are no longer up-to-date and there is the constant threat of misplacing or losing my cellphone looming over my head (four years ago I lost a silver Sony Ericsson T610 and all the contacts on it—last seen somewhere in downtown Hamburg. Any reported sightings are welcome).
And for two years now my social network contacts have been a part of my life. Though these details are up-to-date, they are only maintained by that contact directly. The problem then is if some of the data or a whole profile is removed, that cuts me off from the information. Put in only a few words: things are really chaotic. I certainly don’t need to mention that several contacts are scattered across several address archives with varying details, which doesn’t help matters either.
Given this situation, we came to the conclusion that address books and contacts need a completely new development approach. But what should this approach involve? We thought that if individual contacts were interconnected, this would bring an end to invalid or inaccurate contact data.
Our vision is for every user to keep his or her data up-to-date and make sure all of that person’s friends have these changes updated in their own address book. In addition, the new address book would have to throw down the stiff old convention of individual fields and be arranged in a new and more flexible manner and be made editable as users chose them to be, without disregarding patterns it was familiar with. This flexibility is also needed if users want to use just one address book and choose not to continue archiving their contacts in phonebooks, in Outlook, on social network platforms, in the address book of their e-mail providers, etc. In addition, we wanted to place a clear focus on data security and the user experience.
This solution can therefore be summarized and will become available in the cellity Communicator:
- Keeping all data stored in one place.
- Direct exchange of contact data so that changes to data can be automatically adopted by other users as well.
- Secure data, meaning protection from the risk of losing data and data is kept secure from third-parties (see the ‘convenience’ post I will publish here on September 25).
- Convenient and direct use of contacts and the communication this enables (see the ‘convenience’ post I will publish here on September 25).
- Linking this data with a number of other potential applications, if users want to take advantage of these apps (this keeps the application manageable). (see the ‘communicate’ post I will publish here on September 18)
They key statements imply quite a number of further steps which we have developed in the cellity Communicator and which will be launched when the release goes live.
I will be interested to hear your responses and look forward to writing my next post on the topic of ‘communicate’ next week.
Best regards
Joerg Land
Product – cellity AG
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