Brewster: Hyperconnected Mobile Address Book
avc.com
avc.com
1) You cannot access the recent calls list. Most people don't use their address book to keep in touch, but rather use their recent calls list. Not being able to access that list means that a huge number of people can't replace the default address book with your product.
2) You cannot be the default. Whenever I make a call, I am kicked back into the built-in Phone.app. This is incredibly confusing for users.
3) It's a momentous performance challenge. When users open the default Phone app, their contacts appear instantaneously. If you want to replace the default, you need to be sure that your address book does whatever it needs to insanely fast. We managed to get the process of syncing an address book down to seconds, but Brewster has unfortunately taken nearly an hour for me. Many, many people will drop out at this point and think the app is broken.
4) It's an enterprise product. Most people's address books are incredibly tiny and include bad data (nicknames, just first names, no names at all), which makes it very hard for a service to provide any type of value add. The only place where you can do an excellent job is for people with thousands of contacts.
5) Privacy concerns. For a product like this to have a great value add, you need to provide the service with a ton of personal data. You need my Facebook, you need my email, you need my address book and much more. Many folks will see this and drop out of the app right then and there.
It might be possible to get around these hurdles, but Brewster has a long way to go.
As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare.
I recently uninstalled Facebook from my phone because of the whole address book fiasco. I'm back to a simple list of contacts that I know personally - and it's great.
I'm probably just being a Luddite. I want an address book so I can quickly call Ted. Not so I can wade through all my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, <Insert Social Service> friends while attempting to call Ted.
That is a feature that can be disabled, for one.
For two, every address book platform supports partitioning contacts by category. For instance, i'm a member of the HN G+ circle. Those thousands of contacts don't pollute my usual view because my personal contacts are in another book, which I have set as the default view on my phone.
So I'll concede that in this scenario it may simply be a failure of the platform and not Facebook/Address Books in general. But I think my core point stands.
http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-...
The problem you describe is that "smart" address books are actually quite dumb-- they don't understand the context. When you're just trying to call Ted, you don't really care how many mutual friends you have. The solution is actually well-known in the literature for a long time: focus+context (and relatedly overview +details on demand). Show the caller an easy way to get to Ted's number, stat. The rest is just context, which should really only be shown when the user wants to know more about Ted.
Side thought: maybe, what would be useful are phones that guess who you want to call. Instead of the "most recent" list on a phone, maybe you want a "most likely to call now".
And speaking of Google, they have a "Gesture Search" app that I use all the time to find contacts which I don't think will be on the top of the recent calls list. Usually it doesn't take more than one poorly drawn character at the start of someone's name to have them near the top of the result list. Search, don't sort, and all that.
I'm so mixed on this. I've run in to a number of people who've spent months and sometimes years trying to 'fix something that isn't working in their world', and it's usually because they don't really understand the industry, or how people really work, or they've not investigated the options out there which already exist (or which have already failed).
Not saying Brewster necessarily falls in to that camp, and I get that you'd want to fund people with passion, but... sometimes spending a lot of time fixing problems that keep you up at night just... isn't a good use of your time. It's generally only in hindsight that you can make that judgement, but writing this sort of stuff seems to encourage that sort of behaviour.
2. The app slurped up all my accounts and then told me to leave.. They would message me when everything was ready.
3. I got a message 20 minutes later.
4. I opened the app and saw a grid of flashing gray blocks. Some blocks had names of my contacts on them.
5. No photos loaded, but the blocks kept flashing.
6. The app asked me to select my favorite contacts. What the hell?! Aren't you supposed to auto magically figure that out?
7. I couldn't find my wife in the giant list.
8. The contacts seemed to be in completely random order. People I had forgotten about were at the top of the list.
Maybe the demand spike caused a server failure, but I am disappointed.