All the nerd events I've been attending lately have highlighted a problem I've long had: sometimes, I'd like a way to keep track of all the folks I meet. I want something like <a href="http://www.openngo.org">CiviCRM</a>, but less complicated, and geared towards single users, not huge organizations. A personal contact manager.
The Mac Address Book is a wonderful thing, but I find it inadequate in a few ways. I've said that I'm not a big tagger -- I see why it's useful but it's not something that helps me out very often. However, it'd be great to be able to attach a freeform list of tags to contacts, so that you can keep track of where you met them, what they do and so forth. I've looked all over for an address book with tags, and there isn't any. CiviCRM purports to allow contact-tagging, but you have to define the tags beforehand, which runs counter to the philosophy of tagging. Plaxo doesn't let me tag -- it went into my Gmail account and slurped the address of anyone I've had email contact with, so now I've got a list of 1000 names and no context for any of them. That's what tags are nice for in this case: to make it quick and easy to add additional useful context to a person.
Also, I got turned on to microformats at BarCamp, and it's nice to see that a lot of the folks I met there have hCards so that I don't have to type business cards in manually. Or, I wouldn't have to type them in manually if there were any tools out there that use them (Technorati has an hCard-to-vCard converter, but extra work make me cry). I'd like to press the "New Contact" button, type in the person's name, click "Find hCard" and have Technorati provide me with a list of possible hCards for that person that I can import directly.
So that's what I've been working on a little bit, as a Summer of Rails project. The first step is to basically clone the functionality of the Mac address book. Lots of in-place editing, easy customizable fields, auto-complete goodness. Along with that comes tagging, because it's trivial to make objects taggable in rails.
Then the hCard/vCard import/export hijinks.
Then the drag 'n drop excitement.
Name? As of today, I'm thinking "Amigosphere".
