the address book we need today
I still remember the little cloth-bound address book my mother kept next to the phone in the kitchen (on Brewster Drive). She used a ballpoint pen to write in everyone’s contact information by hand, and when someone’s number changed, she crossed it out and carefully wrote in their new information. It was a slow and inefficient process. But for the few dozen contacts she had, it worked.
Now, two decades later, when we all have hundreds or even thousands of contacts stored digitally, we still rely on more or less the same model, leaving us with an overwhelming number of outdated contacts and missing information that’s impossible to update manually. When a friend sends an email saying their number has changed, why do we still enter that information by hand? And why are we each managing everyone else’s info? How can we make sure our communication apps have the contact info we need when we need it?
Though you rarely open your Contacts app, you use it all the time through other apps, from native communication apps like your phone’s dialer, text messaging, and email to social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Kik. Yet to successfully use these apps, you need an address book in which people’s contact information is up-to-date and accessible.
A digital-first address book needs to rethink assumptions from the analog world, and it’s helpful to start afresh by looking at the primary components of modern relationships:
- Who: the people we know
- What: the contexts in which we know them
- How: the methods we use to communicate with them
Over sociocultural evolution, the “Who,” “What,” and “How” of modern relationships have become vastly more complex as our lives have grown to encompass more people, more contexts, and more communication services. In the past, the “Who” was limited to a few dozen people. The “What” was tied to just a few domains like food, water, and shelter. And the “How” was simple: the only way to communicate was to talk to someone face-to-face. Obviously, this has changed drastically.
In 2004, the average person had 100 contacts. Today, that number has grown to over 1,000. It’s not just that we know more people than we once did. As technology has advanced, our lives have become multidimensional. There’s an ever greater number of ways to meet new people. Ten years ago, the average American stayed at their job for five years. Today it’s half that. We move cities more often, go to more schools, and have more outlets for hobbies. The result is that we know more people from a greater variety of contexts.
Additionally, the number of ways to stay connected has grown exponentially. Gone are the days of one person, one way to reach them. Today, the average person uses eight communication services to keep in touch. Gmail has more than a billion users and iCloud is close behind. More than 700 million people around the world use WhatsApp. Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and Snapchat each have hundreds of millions of users. Facebook comes in at 1.35 billion users.
But how useful are all these services if we don’t have up-to-date contact information for people? It’s become increasingly difficult to manage the increasing number of contacts and relationships manually, and our address books are riddled with duplicates, incomplete contacts, and old outdated information. It’s no wonder that contact management feels like a lost cause.
The solution is to take the “Who” layer — that is, our address books — and unbundle it from the exploding number of messaging apps, social networks, and communication apps that constitute “How” layer.
The “What” layer does the routing of the “Who” to the contextually relevant “How” for a particular use occasion. We have all these amazing new technologies, but your contacts are what makes social-enabled services work. Our devices are accessible, but we need to fix the “Who” layer in order to make them personal.
That’s our mission at Brewster: to make technology personal by focusing on the “Who” layer, fixing the way we handle contacts and creating an address book system that just works. Instead of being a static repository of information, we believe address books should be automated, networked, and synced.
As people create, develop, and maintain relationships via a growing number of services, we need an address book that brings our contacts together in one place, merging profiles scattered across the web and eliminating duplicates. We need an address book that reflects our constantly changing networks as relationships start, grow, and evolve.
A digital-first address book would mean each of us is responsible for keeping our own contact information up-to-date, as we do with the White Pages. But whereas the White Pages is geography-bound, a digital-first address book should be relationship-bound, seamlessly pulling in the most up-to-date contact information for everyone you know — and automatically serving your own current info to them in turn.
Keeping your phone numbers and email addresses up-to-date is the key to making your other apps work. That’s why a digital-first address book should be available on all your devices, synced directly with your native Contacts app, since that’s the app that has already established the “last mile” connection to your phone’s dialer, email, and messaging apps. Another benefit of syncing to the Contacts app is the ability to view photos for all your contacts, as well as the ability to search by city or workplace.
As digital technology gives us new ways to meet people, keeping your friends’ contact info current doesn’t have to feel like a lost cause. The future of contacts is an address book that’s responsive to our many relationships and ultimately, to us: representing the contexts in which we know each other, improving the many ways we communicate, and always up-to-date because it’s maintained and updated by our contacts themselves.
A true digital-first address book is what will make your device yours, make your apps fun, and make your technology feel personal.
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