A Techie Tech Writer Blog

Mozilla Labs has announced the winners of the Contacts Design Challenge, which posed the question to designers of "What are the interesting uses of having a complete list of all your contacts and relationships in your browser, for both local browser applications and services on the web?" The design concepts honored by the judging panel are great, and put forward many useful ideas. Go take a look and then come back here.

None of the design concepts quite addresses the use case that I've recently felt a need for, which is defining groups of contacts from multiple sources, to use within web applications.

Since I've started working remotely from home, I sometimes choose to go sit and work in one of several local coffee shops, for a change of scenery and some live interaction. I know a number of other remote and self-employed workers, who I know also work from coffee shops sometimes. It would be great if we could coordinate so that some of us are at the same coffee shop at the same time. There are web-based services like Foursquare and Yelp that support sending notifications about one's location. But I don't want to require all my coffee buddies to join yet another web service. Some of them are on Facebook, but I don't want to annoy my out-of-town Facebook friends with an update every time I visit a coffee shop. Some of them are on Twitter, but I don't want to end up on Please Rob Me by broadcasting to the universe that I'm not at home. For some of my contacts, I just have an email address, or a mobile phone number that I could send a text message to.

What I want is to not only have all my contacts from various sources aggregated, as in Toby Shorin's design concept, but to define groups of contacts, regardless of the source of the contact. Then, when I want to send an update to members of that group, the software automatically takes care of sending that update to each member of the group, in a way appropriate to the source of the contact. Better yet, sending to those groups should be available to web applications, so that I could tell Foursquare to notify my Coffee Buddies group, just as it currently can update my Facebook or Twitter accounts.

That's what I want. Now I just need to get Mozilla Labs to make it happen.