That would be the kind of information that would be neat if Jaiku (or just a connected address book) could just expose - that is, being on a call with someone who is on the same social network that such status information is shared
@arjw Do you see this as something which hooks into the Dialler and logs the fact a call took place? Or is it just a feature of the Address Book: so that selecting someone's address book entry logs the fact that you want to initiate a call?
The former would capture all calls whilst the latter could offer the user fine-grained privacy options e.g. buttons marked Call&Log and Call.
I see both actually; the former because most times the call log is the most accessed "address book" that people use. But the latter giving the ability to connect that caller information to other device or online services as needed.
@arjw Now that you mention it I'm surprised that there isn't much intelligence in the call logs of phones. @petteri once mentioned to me that one of the founding ideas behind Jaiku was research which showed that most phone calls begin with the phrase "can you talk?"
I wonder what other insights could be gleaned from call logs and what services could be provided to users based on this?
Address books as a whole are not well done; they follow a methodology of the "little black book" and pretty much that's it.
Enabling features such as plugging into other social networks, extracting call info for other applications, etc. has been done on such a silo-like scale that many people don't get it. Forgetting presence and status for a minute, just making something like the call log appear in one's calendar (a separate tab), or a mapping application (a separate view noting where and when the call took place), are just some of those features that seem to have just been missed.
@jyri: exactly, but more. Once that phone call is "off the record" what do we do with that information. Can we look at the person's contact card and see those stats, what about adding information to a person based on those stats (auto-phone responses based on cell-ID and such), are we doing anything with that information...
...or just treating our digital phone books as bits and bytes of the same little black book that we are used to seeing ;)
@arjw I agree completely with your points. You reminded me of Slife: http://www.slifelabs.com/ which tries to improve productivity by showing you detailed stats about the apps you've used. Theoretically this means you should be able to do searches like: show me all the documents I was working on last wednesday and any web pages I visited whilst working on them.
I tend to think the time is coming to an end where people will spend £1000 on computers that just sit there. They want their computing power to be with them 24/7. So if people are living their lives on their phones then they're going to start wanting to be able to perform context-sensitive searches of their call-log like: who did I call last wednesday or show me all the international numbers I've called in the last month where the call lasted longer than 30 minutes.
The name "addressbook" automatically gets people thinking about an electronic version of their paper-based addressbook rather than trying to imagine an app which provides sophisticated directory services to all the others apps on the phone and just happens to ship with a default UI that does contact management.
In fact I'd probably want all of this information to be stored online somewhere so that if I lose my phone I can remotely wipe it and sync everything to my new phone. As @arjw has pointed out once this data is online then you can mash it up with all the other online services you use such as calendars, social mapping tools and even event planners.
Had a sudden realisation about why Shelf: http://jerakeen.org/code/shelf/ by @jerakeen doesn't seem to work for me. None of the people in my address book have urls.
A next-generation address book should:
give me a url: example.com/me
find a url for all my contacts example.com/mycontact1
give all my contacts a url under my namespace example.com/me/mycontact1 This way I have one place to aggregate info I own that is about them. This would handle the case where a contact doesn't have a url of their own (e.g. my mother), let me have a place to track which aspects of my contact's online presence I'm tracking and let me keep notes on them e.g. potential birthday presents for mycontact1. It also makes explicit the idea that the relationship between me and my contacts is asymmetric.
It doesn't help that the 'url' field in Addressbook.app is hidden by default, I'll admit. Shelf development has dropped off rather, alas, but it should be possible to derive context about a web page without having to have an address book card about the person you're looking at. But when I chose to use the Scripting bridge 'Address book card' object as the main pivot in my code, I limited my options rather. Refectoring is in order.
9 comments so far
That would be the kind of information that would be neat if Jaiku (or just a connected address book) could just expose - that is, being on a call with someone who is on the same social network that such status information is shared
10 months, 3 weeks ago by arjw
@arjw Do you see this as something which hooks into the Dialler and logs the fact a call took place? Or is it just a feature of the Address Book: so that selecting someone's address book entry logs the fact that you want to initiate a call?
The former would capture all calls whilst the latter could offer the user fine-grained privacy options e.g. buttons marked Call&Log and Call.
10 months, 3 weeks ago by adewale
I see both actually; the former because most times the call log is the most accessed "address book" that people use. But the latter giving the ability to connect that caller information to other device or online services as needed.
10 months, 3 weeks ago by arjw
This reminds me of the 'this chat is off the record' note in Gmail's in-browser chats
10 months, 2 weeks ago by jyri
@arjw Now that you mention it I'm surprised that there isn't much intelligence in the call logs of phones. @petteri once mentioned to me that one of the founding ideas behind Jaiku was research which showed that most phone calls begin with the phrase "can you talk?"
I wonder what other insights could be gleaned from call logs and what services could be provided to users based on this?
10 months, 2 weeks ago by adewale
Address books as a whole are not well done; they follow a methodology of the "little black book" and pretty much that's it.
Enabling features such as plugging into other social networks, extracting call info for other applications, etc. has been done on such a silo-like scale that many people don't get it. Forgetting presence and status for a minute, just making something like the call log appear in one's calendar (a separate tab), or a mapping application (a separate view noting where and when the call took place), are just some of those features that seem to have just been missed.
@jyri: exactly, but more. Once that phone call is "off the record" what do we do with that information. Can we look at the person's contact card and see those stats, what about adding information to a person based on those stats (auto-phone responses based on cell-ID and such), are we doing anything with that information...
...or just treating our digital phone books as bits and bytes of the same little black book that we are used to seeing ;)
10 months, 2 weeks ago by arjw
@arjw I agree completely with your points. You reminded me of Slife: http://www.slifelabs.com/ which tries to improve productivity by showing you detailed stats about the apps you've used. Theoretically this means you should be able to do searches like: show me all the documents I was working on last wednesday and any web pages I visited whilst working on them.
I tend to think the time is coming to an end where people will spend £1000 on computers that just sit there. They want their computing power to be with them 24/7. So if people are living their lives on their phones then they're going to start wanting to be able to perform context-sensitive searches of their call-log like: who did I call last wednesday or show me all the international numbers I've called in the last month where the call lasted longer than 30 minutes.
The name "addressbook" automatically gets people thinking about an electronic version of their paper-based addressbook rather than trying to imagine an app which provides sophisticated directory services to all the others apps on the phone and just happens to ship with a default UI that does contact management.
In fact I'd probably want all of this information to be stored online somewhere so that if I lose my phone I can remotely wipe it and sync everything to my new phone. As @arjw has pointed out once this data is online then you can mash it up with all the other online services you use such as calendars, social mapping tools and even event planners.
10 months, 2 weeks ago by adewale
Had a sudden realisation about why Shelf: http://jerakeen.org/code/shelf/ by @jerakeen doesn't seem to work for me. None of the people in my address book have urls.
A next-generation address book should:
give me a url: example.com/me
find a url for all my contacts example.com/mycontact1
give all my contacts a url under my namespace example.com/me/mycontact1 This way I have one place to aggregate info I own that is about them. This would handle the case where a contact doesn't have a url of their own (e.g. my mother), let me have a place to track which aspects of my contact's online presence I'm tracking and let me keep notes on them e.g. potential birthday presents for mycontact1. It also makes explicit the idea that the relationship between me and my contacts is asymmetric.
10 months, 2 weeks ago by adewale
It doesn't help that the 'url' field in Addressbook.app is hidden by default, I'll admit. Shelf development has dropped off rather, alas, but it should be possible to derive context about a web page without having to have an address book card about the person you're looking at. But when I chose to use the Scripting bridge 'Address book card' object as the main pivot in my code, I limited my options rather. Refectoring is in order.
10 months, 2 weeks ago by jerakeen