The 2 "import contacts" problems of social web applications
Many of the new web application got very quick viral development through the feature called "import contacts", meaning you can import your address book from most webmails and sometimes from key other application like Outlook or ThunderBird.
With that feature you can in a couple of clicks import your friends' email and then send them an invite to join you wherever you are. There are only 2 important problems
- When you import your contact book, none of the web services is doing a smart display of who are of most important contacts and therefore you need to select manually among those you want to invite.
- But the worst problem is that the contacts imported are only those you decide to import at that specific moment. What about the future contacts that are not yet in my list? My gmail contacts list for eg. increases after that and once i have invited joined the new service and invited my friends it is very unlikely i go through that process again.
What should be done?
- Webmails should create a list of most used contacts and share them in their apis
- Social Networks and applications should be able to ask the permission to the users to run that process for him at a variable frequency (or send an optin alert every quarter) and alert the user automatically when a new friend from his contact his is already in the application and who among the "new" top contacts are not in yet.
What is also missing to ALL social application invitation systems is the possibility to import in one click and invite my contacts on my mobile phone which are in essence probably the most important ones.
Will probably come one day. Maybe an idea for a startup?
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