Interesting idea: Tagging contacts in your instant messenger?
While going through my instant messenger contact list, I began thinking of new ways that I could use to sort my list. There hasn’t been any innovation in terms of how contacts are shown in a contact list. A list always consists of a list of groups, and then there are contacts under each group. Each contact can only belong to one group.
It would be interesting to see tags applied to contacts. I’d love to see a web-based instant messaging client take an initiative on this, such as meebo, or desktop clients such as Adium or Trillian, because they are more flexible and can apply these types of features without requiring that the actual network support it.
The problem with my list currently is that I actually ran out of the number of groups allowed on MSN since I have quite a few contacts and I try to keep a limit of 25 or so as the maximum number of contacts in a group, to make it easier to browse through the dozens of groups that I have.
If I were able to tag each contact, then that would introduce a whole new paradigm into the scheme of things, and give a whole different perspective into IM management. In general, I’d love to see new innovation in the instant messaging field beyond the expected features like audio and video support.
What do YOU think about this? Do you have anything that you’d like to see supported in IM services?
