I've looked pretty hard into this, and the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the trouble isn't technical, it's social. Do you really want your friends putting your contact info in the cloud? In order for this to work, you really need a mechanism for people to approve sharing their info, control what gets exposed, etc. If you built such a mechanism, it has some obvious advantages - e.g. someone can update their own address and have the change be automatically propagated - but it also makes it much more complicated. It's doable, but established social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) have such a head start that you'd have to worry about them stomping you from day one.
Well I think there are two different problems - personal and professional addresses. While I may not want my info public in the cloud, my plumber (for the sake of argument) presumably does not feel the same way, because his details are on his website. So problem #1 is getting the kind of free-format contact info you find in the "Contact Us" sections of websites into my addressbook. There is no technical barrier here - vcards/hcards are a decent but under-utilised standard.
Problem #2 (personal information) you are right, it needs restriction. But a household is probably quite happy to share addresses - not in the sense of each member having an identical addressbook, but in the sense of sharing some common groups - just like sharing calendars works now.
I just can't understand the seeming lack of interest in this area - address info is the one untapped area that everybody uses. But there must be some stunning lack of interest in it - which would also explain why the Google Contacts UI is so poor.
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I've looked pretty hard into this, and the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the trouble isn't technical, it's social. Do you really want your friends putting your contact info in the cloud? In order for this to work, you really need a mechanism for people to approve sharing their info, control what gets exposed, etc. If you built such a mechanism, it has some obvious advantages - e.g. someone can update their own address and have the change be automatically propagated - but it also makes it much more complicated. It's doable, but established social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) have such a head start that you'd have to worry about them stomping you from day one.
Well I think there are two different problems - personal and professional addresses. While I may not want my info public in the cloud, my plumber (for the sake of argument) presumably does not feel the same way, because his details are on his website. So problem #1 is getting the kind of free-format contact info you find in the "Contact Us" sections of websites into my addressbook. There is no technical barrier here - vcards/hcards are a decent but under-utilised standard.
Problem #2 (personal information) you are right, it needs restriction. But a household is probably quite happy to share addresses - not in the sense of each member having an identical addressbook, but in the sense of sharing some common groups - just like sharing calendars works now.
I just can't understand the seeming lack of interest in this area - address info is the one untapped area that everybody uses. But there must be some stunning lack of interest in it - which would also explain why the Google Contacts UI is so poor.