Pre's approach to contacts is really the future of contact management.
There's a part in my interview with Russ Daniels, HP's VP of Cloud
Services Strategy, that I keep coming back to, where Russ is
describing the hassle of syncing contacts between multiple devices;
most of this hassle stems from the fact that devices tend to view your
contacts database as pool of data, instead of a service.
What none of them do is the simple thing of, "tell me the URL for your
contact service." Additionally, it has to be a service, not a
repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant
for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able
to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it
synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind
this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries.
The Pre is the first device I've used that expects all contact data to
come from a service instead of a repository. Give it your Google,
Facebook, Exchange, or AIM credentials, and it pulls all of the
contacts for those services down onto the device. Ultimately, webOS
presumes that the canonical source for your contact data is a cloud or
server somewhere, and that your phone merely acts as a local cache for
this data. (In fact, webOS's contact management is so service-oriented
that it's kind of a pain to access a traditional contact
repository?like a standard vcard collection, for instance.)
State ⇒ Accepted
Priority ⇒ 1. Low
Type ⇒ Enhancement
Summary ⇒ contacts as a service
Queue ⇒ Turba
Milestone ⇒
Patch ⇒ No
Pre's approach to contacts is really the future of contact management.
There's a part in my interview with Russ Daniels, HP's VP of Cloud
Services Strategy, that I keep coming back to, where Russ is
describing the hassle of syncing contacts between multiple devices;
most of this hassle stems from the fact that devices tend to view your
contacts database as pool of data, instead of a service.
What none of them do is the simple thing of, "tell me the URL for your
contact service." Additionally, it has to be a service, not a
repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant
for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able
to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it
synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind
this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries.
The Pre is the first device I've used that expects all contact data to
come from a service instead of a repository. Give it your Google,
Facebook, Exchange, or AIM credentials, and it pulls all of the
contacts for those services down onto the device. Ultimately, webOS
presumes that the canonical source for your contact data is a cloud or
server somewhere, and that your phone merely acts as a local cache for
this data. (In fact, webOS's contact management is so service-oriented
that it's kind of a pain to access a traditional contact
repository?like a standard vcard collection, for instance.)