Highly unoriginal thoughts about mobile devices...

Posted May 21, 2003 7:09 PM.

Notes from a conversation with Dan Hill pertaining (in particular) to address books on mobile phones. I make no claim to their originality or their novelty. Almost certainly they're on page six of a really well known influential book that I almost certainly should have read by now...

Thought one: The mobile phone address book as a web of trust. This is really trivial, but it's also really powerful - the telephone numbers in your mobile phone all identify actual people (however you decide to encode the metadata of their names). The telephone number is like the unique id number that you give a field in a database. So what does it mean if a pair of phones have each others numbers in their address book? Doesn't it imply a relationship? Perhaps even a similarity? Maybe it even means that you're more likely than average to like each other? So if you pinged every phone that's got internet access (and the phone was happy for you to do this) you could pretty easily make a social network map of pretty much everyone in the country. This is not a new idea.

Thought two Self-assembly address books. So you've lost your phone and with it you've lost all of your numbers. So you ring up two or three of your friends and they amend their record to your new number and you add their numbers to your phone. Then you trigger the 'fix my address book' trigger and sit back and watch. Your phone pings your friends' phones. Their phones ping their friends' phones. Everyone who has your old number in it is informed of your new number, and they ping your phone and build in the reciprocal links. And those people who appear most interconnected between the groups of friends you've mentioned are also added to your phone. An instant sense of your social network. An instant way of grabbing your local space... This is probably not a new idea.

Thought three Distributed 192. 192 was (until very recently) the telephone number for directory enquiries in the UK. You ring it, tell them the name and address of the person you're looking for and they give you a number. Brilliant. Except if you don't have their address of course. And it costs money and stuff. And it doesn't work with mobiles. So what if instead of doing that, you typed in a search term, "Coates" into your phone and got it to ping everyone in your address book, aggregate the results and display them to you. Wouldn't that be easier? I don't know whether this is a new idea or not. I would doubt it.

Thought four Collaborative work over mobile phones. So you've got a web-of-trust and you have a communications medium. So basically that's friendster then with a rather more intensive old-skool version of instant messaging (let's call it "speech"). I wonder if there are people out there working on social software for phones. Or maybe social software that doesn't actually have much of a human interface at all, something that's really collaboratively sense related. Like a cyber-pet with two buttons that you can press - one if you really like a place and one if you really hate it. And then that's geocoded and shared through your web of trust (because you're similar to people you know). When you go into a place that everyone dislikes, your cyberpet freaks out. And if you go to a place that everyone likes, it starts to purr pleasantly in your pocket... I bet someone has thought of that as well...