iPhone Poundup

Both writing and reading computer blog posts bore me, but occasionally it is useful to put up something to stimulate discussion. So today there are two things up: iPodia and the woeful state of the Address Book.app.

Probably 90% of my use of Safari on the iPhone is split between Facebook and Wikipedia (though now that Google Reader has a great new iPhone-friendly interface, I’ve started reading that while on the train). Facebook’s iPhone site is well known and already immortalized by Apple itself in its iPhone ad campaign. As mentioned above, Google Reader is now iPhone aware, too, and some sites (like Daily Kos) can tell I’m on an iPhone and magnify their text accordingly.

So I had hoped that there might be a iphone.wikipedia.org that I could use. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. Luckily, a bit of googling yielded iPodia. It’s not perfect, and I’ll let the site speak for itself as far as its features are concerned, but it is the closest thing we have to a iPhone Wikipedia, and that’s pretty darned cool, so I encourage people to add it as a bookmark—it really makes using and reading Wikipedia so much easier.

My second complaint is with the Address Book.app. Two of my friends, Aras and Kristina, recently moved. They are married. When I received the “We’ve moved” email, I had to, then, go and enter the data in twice, once for Kristinos card, and once for Aro.

My mom’s old address book was arranged heteronormatively, and problems like these did not arise—after all, 20 years ago, addresses mattered only as households. Aras and Kristina would not have needed separate cards in an address book, since they would have shared an address, a telephone number, and e-mail didn’t exist.

In the business world (the mythic Rolodex), contact information might have been more complex, since there could be more relation involved—say you would want to keep all your contacts from one company together—but I suspect it would not be particularly volatile, or that there would even be that many contacts at a specific company. You have one business card for Acme Steel—your sales rep’s. When he retires, you get the card of the new guy.

Either way, the melding of professional and social (as predicted by Spalding Gray’s character in Talking Heads’ cautionary tale True Stories), has been profoundly accelerated by the internet, and now address books need to catch up. Individuals have not only separate telephone numbers for themselves, but they often have multiple numbers. Furthermore, individuals now have e-mail addresses (and often they have multiple instances of those, too). The idea of a single household phone number, then, becomes a sort of nearly foolish thing to keep track of, as does tracking a personal address book on the household unit.

Yet the internet has not accelerated the rate of people’s getting separate postal addresses. So while Address Book.app does a good job of letting me fill any individual’s card with telephone numbers, emails, AIM screennames, and the like, it does a terrible job of allowing me some level of relation between cards, to allow me to create a web of contacts.

So having a “Mr. & Mrs. Aras” card like 20 years ago is useless, since it carries too little information. But, at the same time, having separate cards for Aras and Kristina is foolish since it carries redundant information—information that has to be updated separately. And this is not limited just to postal addresses: contact databases are good places to store important (shared) dates, like anniversaries, birthdays (and names) of progeny, etc.

Facebook allows users to establish (romantic) relationships between themselves, which, then, create a level of relationality to the user pages. If I click on Aro profile page, I can see that he is married to Kristina, and I can then click to her profile through that. The Address Book.app should take that a step further, allowing the user entering the data to be able to juggle a bunch of balls at once when making contact information more complex.

This is useful then not only for people who get married, but also for people who cohabit under any sort of circumstances or share any kind of information that is mostly (but not entirely) static. As long as Address Book.app retains the metaphor of the Rolodex (with independent cards unaware of the existence of other cards), then the database will have a frustrating limit on its usability.

Now there is a reason I have only started complaining about Address Book.app now: I found it to be a pretty useless application before I got an iPhone. All of the contact information I needed was saved in my email (email and postal addresses) or on my phone (telephone numbers). In fact, I used Address Book.app exclusively to back up telephone numbers back when I was using Nokias and Motorolas.

But the iPhone breathes life into the application. The information on a person’s card in Address Book.app provides telephone numbers to call/sms, email addresses to email using the phone’s email client (I don’t use Mail.app, so this was never important before), pictures that identify the user when they call (or you call them), addresses that you can feed straight into the Google Maps iPhone app to get driving directions on your phone, birthdays that appear on your telephone’s calendar, and, once chat/skype functionality arrives on the iPhone, a table of skype/IM contacts.

All this added functionality makes careful handling (and weeding) of the Address Book.app far more important than ever before. It is no longer a mere backup of telephone numbers. It’s now the backbone that provides all the social interaction done by the telephone (save what I do via Facebook). And now that it has taken on such an important role, the limitations of it become more starkly clear.

I don’t know how this sort of convergence compares to Outlook and Exchange servers. It seems possible that those user databases can provide complex levels of relation because they are centrally administered (and perhaps allow for users to update their own information, which then gets pushed to everyone who subscribes to their contact info). That is, obviously, impossible for the realm of a personal address book.

But now that the iPhone has given the Address Book.app a reason to be used, heavily, it is up to Apple to make the app worth using, heavily.

Tags: Apple, contacts, databases, iPhone, relation