More on RSSContact

I've been driving Chris Jordan and co at RSSContact nuts because I set up an account and then for 3 days couldn't login, even though Chris and the folks could. BTW, they also do RSSCalendar

However, this morning its copacetic and I finally managed to set up my online RSS Business Card which is fine and dandy. You can even add the details as a VCard to Outlook. I've got Chris' feed as well.

So far, so good. Now I have some contact details and a calendar, all being generated on RSS feeds.

But now I want to see where it goes from here because lets assume that RSSC is successful and hundreds of people I know sign up and we all give each other permission to have access to the feed; then what?

I can't manege several hundred RSS Feeds in Awasu and, although I can import them all to Outlook, at that point I lose the link between the VCard and the feed which means that when you update the details, I'll be stuck with the wrong ones in Outlook.

OK, MS has announced that the coming editions will support RSS, though god knows what that will mean in MS-speak, but I can't wait that long and I personally don't use Outlook.

So, what I need is a PIM that can use the feed at the input side, cache the current feed (because who wants to lose all that data if Chris' server or my connection go down) and enable you to update my contact details every time I go online if something has changed.

Maybe it should also create its own feed that, when I login to check for any updates in other people's data, is then also queried for m data updates as well so that i don't even have to think about logging in somewhere to make the changes.

Meanwhile, I need to have a calendar function that also interacts with my feed and through which i can subscribe to other people's feeds so that we can keep each other in touch wioth our common plans. Of course I'll also want a meetup tool so that, if we find we are going to the same event we can make some arrangements for a beer ahead of time. Perhaps it could work with LinkedIn.

Anyone know of such a beast? In the meantime, check out RSSContact and tell me what you think.

And I would love to hear more from Chris and co about how they plan to make a buck out of this. One way might be to sell the biz to MS when it gets RSSified, although I can see serious problems with that from the users. So what's the plan? How are the users going to be turned into customers to pay the bills?

Comments

[Taka]

This is the kind of thing Awasu was specifically designed to handle! :-)

All you need to do is 1) subscribe to the feeds 2) use a PIM that exposes an interface that other programs can use 3) attach a hook script to each channel that gets run every time the feed is updated and forwards the contact details on to the PIM.

Of course, (3) is the funky bit but shouldn't be hard for someone familiar with programming Outlook to do.