GrandCentral is People-Centric

the idea itself is pretty straight-forward i think (one number to call me, egal where i am), the problem rather seems that enum and other design-by-committee initiatives never got off the ground.

“What we need now is a URL for every person”

Off the cuff, OpenID would seem to be a starting point for that. Right now, there’s no standard for what is on or linked from the OpenID page outside of OpenID-isms, but embedding hCards (or linking to them) would help with the contact information. The problem is privacy: just because Person X should be able to say “I want to talk on the phone with Joshua Porter(bokardo.com)” doesn’t mean that Person Y should.

Isn’t Facebook, with IM and VoIP Facebook Apps, basically the unified communications system you describe? You can get to anyone’s profile just by name and then choose how you wish to contact them.

I think it is a very good idea!

I’ve also always felt that phone numbers should be innovated to be unique personal addresses in a similar sense to how URLs or email addresses are used. There’s no reason to have to keep changing phone numbers based on your location.

I would be extremely happy if, after this and next year’s mass adoption of OpenID, someone (Google?) implements an OpenID-based communications system. If we’re going to go down the path of single sign-on then we might as well use it for Single Point of Contact (or some similar term).

but skype is doing that, right? their goal is that everyone uses skype instead of the phone. so you give out something like firstname_lastname to your acquaintances. and when wifi/wimax will be ubiquitious, i would bet most people would use skype, which is free, instead of using the standard wireless networ.

OpenID would be a good way to go with the caveat that you should be able to have access controls on inbound calling. Obviously there are some security issues to be sorted out here but there is no rational argument for the security by obscurity that I get with my current phone number…

You can achieve the “one true number” thing with something like Vonage as well. I set this up for myself, and thought it would be great, but the major failing is your outgoing caller id. When you call someone from your cell, they don’t know it’s you because they’ve got your “one true number” in their address book. Then when they figure out it’s you, they call you back on your cell number because that’s what you called them on, then the whole thing starts to fall apart… I gave up, and I just use one cell for everything now.

I think you are spot on. Services that place people at central control point will have more currency on the social Web. One must also consider that a growing number of people on the social Web are becoming tele-present. We’re not just physical entities waiting to pick up the phone. Our identities our presence is coming to life across the Inertubes. I want a single point of contact (thanks Rahul) for your meta-presence.

I worry about simplified spam/telemarketing targeting, but I suppose that is one of the constraints we have to blow away. Good stuff.

Totally agree with you. I think we should see some kind of specifications from w3c on specifying contact information exchange or something like that soon. After that it will be integrated with social networks and services like kazavr.com & videntity.org

What you are describing has been nailed out already, and it is called XRI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRI

XRI intruduces new protocols and that makes it hard to gain acceptance (the Cold Start Problem ).
A more pragmatic variant of that is the LID-approach, basically doing the same but everything based on http.

http://lid.netmesh.org/wiki/Main_Page

LID describes a superset of the OpenID functionality

Fantastic idea Rahul. I hope phone companies see your comments. Having unique phone ID is a concept that is long due in this widely connected world.