(2004-04-19) Oreilly Gmail Address Book Osaf

In a piece about GMail, Tim OReilly notes Why should I have to spam all my friends, asking them to "join my network", if my EMail client is smart enough to know who I know, how often I communicate with them, as well as who they know, and how well. (Microsoft Research's Wallop project shows some interesting steps in this direction. Until I saw gmail, I was convinced that Microsoft would eventually own the Social Networking space by adding Wallop features to MsOutlook, since having access to the actual email traffic data and Address Book is so much more powerful than the workarounds that the social network services have to endure. I've been excited about the OSAF/Chandler project because I saw its developers asking themselves how to reinvent the address book for the age of the internet - thinking of contacts as private, public, or somewhere in between. But Chandler seemed like too little, too late to keep Microsoft from owning another promising new application category.) Mozilla really needs to turn its Address Book into something more oriented toward an SOA.