Thoughts on addressbook “solutions”

[senji]

Lots of thought and effort goes into synchronising addressbooks on phones and PDAs and corporate mail servers and the like, and the biggest problem of the lot is that your data goes out of date. Of course, with in a corporation there are often complex X.500/LDAP setups which solve some of this problem, but because these aren't globally accessible

Comments

[mooism]

I've been thinking vaguely about this problem. I'm thinking that your contact details should be stored in the metadata of your homepage. If you don't want your contact details to be globally visible, you insist that agents log in if they want them, using openid or something similar. Of course there is *still* no satisfactory standardised method of distributed authentication.

Encyption would make it all a bit difficult to use. I won't be able to remember my key to scribble it down on a piece of paper, and if I have it printed on a business card, people will make typing mistakes entering it in.

[khendon]

I don't understand why you couldn't just get the devices to talk LDAP; you'll already have to implement new things on them under your scheme, so why not make it something designed for the purpose than bodged on top of DNS?

[senji]

• LDAP is a horrible miscegenation based on X.500 of all things!
• DNS and text (or even DNS and vcard or DNS and some other simple addressbook format) is a lot simpler than LDAP, and consists of componants that most phones already have nowadays.
• LDAP appears to fail to inherently solve the problem of showing different data to different people (short of everyone having an account on everyone's LDAP servers.
• KISS