User:Avazed/Avakit
The importance of "Dynamic contact organization"[edit]
The nature and use of "contact information" as such has significantly evolved in recent years, particularly with the increased use of the Internet for daily communication purposes.
A contact card that once simply contained a phone number and a fax number, should now ideally contain a couple of email addresses, some online messenger ID's, some social application ID's, soon a GrandCentral number, etc.
What's more, these new forms of contact information are much more volatile than the old fixed line phone or fax numbers. People change their contact info much more often that they used to, and an ideal contact card today would be dynamic, showing a person's most updated info at any given time!
Efforts to meet these new needs are already beginning to appear. Some notable examples of innovative contact management ideas are GrandCentral and HighriseHQ. One other one is Avakit which, like the other two stated examples, attempts to address the rising need for "dynamic contact organization". This article describes the Avakit approach in particular.
What is Avakit?[edit]
"KIT" stands for "Keep In Touch". "Ava" is a reference to Avazed, the founding company of the Avakit service.
Avakit is basically a free web-based service that lets users unify all their own updated contact details (their own phone numbers, emails, online ID’s etc), to make them available to their friends/family/colleagues, but with something more: anyone can search for them, but users set some general conditions to control what each person will be able to find.
How does Avakit work?[edit]
People who want to search for a friend/colleague's contact info go to avakit.com, insert something in "last known contact" to prove they know them, and then click on "get current contact info". The idea is that Avakit filters the results by using one contact detail as a lead to other contact details.
For example, an Avakit user can decide that:
• Anyone who tries to find them using their old work phone number should be able to find all their current work contact details (current work phone, current work email)…
• …while anyone who tries to find them using their current personal mobile should be able to find everything (including home phone, personal email, instant messenger ID’s, etc)
Why is Avakit different from a social application?[edit]
Avakit lets anyone search, whether they have an account or not. Users only need to be signed-in to update their own contact information as needed.
The approach is fundamentally different from a social application because users don’t need to categorize every person they know or use lists or groups or networks. They just need to log in once, set some general conditions, and then forget about it until the next time they change your phone number or email address. Search results will be "automatically" selective, based on the information that people use to search.