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?
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Tagging wouldn’t offer much for me, I don’t think. The big things I’d like to see are:
* search. I want to start typing in a name and see only the contacts that match that name; possibly allow secondary matching against nick, email, or other contact info I may have captured.
* possibly tie the contact info into Outlook.
* a better sense of location. What timezone are they in? Can I click a button and see their location on Google Maps?
Unfortunately, there’s barely been anything of interest to me in IM clients in years. There needs to be enterprise-level IM clients. I’d be willing to pay for this.
I’d love to see Skype open up their platform so apps can be developed that use the network. It’s so annoying right now – it’s way too closed, and yet it’s so popular.
Messenger already has the search feature, but for display names only.
Tagging would be helpful, at least for me, since I’m obsessed with organization. Contacts often fall into more than one category, so tagging is the natural alternative.
As mentioned before, WLM already has the “type to find a contact” feature, and it can be pretty useful if you have a large contact list.
I guess the only thing I can think of would be for the IM providers to make their platforms more open, like you’ve said, Gary. It would be nice to have the ability to have Facebook profiles linked off or otherwise integrated into your contact list.
Peter, yeah, in this day and age, what with all the huge announcements made by companies (I’m thinking specifically Facebook’s Platform), that it would be fitting for IM networks to start opening up. That wouldn’t be as surprising since we’re more accustomed to such massive news these days (YouTube buyout, etc.)
I completely agree with this idea. Another twist to it:
- blocking whole user groups by a tag
- expand that into time sensitive blocking and you can separate life and work IMs much better throughout the day
IM as a platform definitely needs to happen. I have heard that Kevin Rose is doing an IM startup, I wonder if it will be open given how important openness has become for digg.
Paul, my feeling about Kevin’s IM startup is that it will not be suitable for a broad audience; Digg is not suitable for a broad audience, it’s for a tech audience.
The IM platform is a very hard game to play in; Jabber tried to create an open network a while ago, and still haven’t completely succeeded yet. (Groan)
naaaaa………… why do people gotta be so dang professional on the internet