So I got bluetooth going on my new cellphone, and I’m using iSync to sync up all my contacts now. I update a phone number in my Apple address book, and my phone will sync. So will my iPod.

But I can’t stop thinking about doing contact management in a more distributed way, not just distributed between all my devices, but distributed between all the people in my network. I’m surely not the first or second person to think of it this way, but it seems like there’s no great implementation yet. Why do I need to manage my address book independently of everyone else? The trouble is, if Jane tells everyone she has a new cell phone number, all of her contacts have to update their address books. So why not have Jane store her contact information on a server, and she can update it as she chooses. I sync to this server when I’m connected, and my local copy is updated automatically. If my phone syncs up shortly after, then I never really need to know that Jane changed her number. It just changes because Jane is part of my network. This is a sort of Friendster/LDAP hybrid. I like it.

Jane has a blog, too, perhaps, that’s tied into her network. Her blog has access control, so she can write an entry which is readable by everyone immediately around her, a specific group of people, everyone two or three links out in the network, or the entire world. The resulting discussion within each entry is also limited in scope. Since Jane has already established a trust relationship with the people in her immediate network, she can trust them with some items that she wouldn’t trust others with. Just as people have different social groups that they’re in: work, place (neighborhood), faith, virtual, etc. Jane needs controls over who sees which parts of her blog. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about her job with people from her church, etc.