This morning I was supposed to meet up with seven other people for a meeting. As I was walking to this appointment I realized I might be a few minutes late. I had my cell phone with me, but which of the other seven people should I call? For some reason this instantly reminded of using instant messaging (IM). One of the interesting features of most IM services is that you get some sort of status for each of the people on your buddy list. I looked at my cell phone and thought, it would be nice to know which of the seven people who are supposed to be at this meeting have their cell phones on right now. Sure I could call and leave a voice mail, but that wouldn’t really help the situation because I was only going to be late by maybe five minutes and they’d likely find a voice mail after I already got there.
Cell phones need grow a buddy list feature, with all of the stupid little things that you can do with it, like setting a status. It would be nice to be able to go to a meeting and set my away message to ‘Do Not Call Unless It Is Important, I Am In A Meeting With The Person Who Signs My Paychecks’ during meetings at work instead of turning my phone off. Of course I’d have to authorize each person who wanted to be on my buddy list, but that would be a small price to pay given the extra features something like this could bring.
Further down the line this gets even stranger, we’d have to come up with a nice (XML?) format for exchanging buddy lists. No reason to have to enter in duplicate lists if I could just sync my phone buddy list with my IM client buddy list. If your IM account info didn’t share your cell phone number then my phone should just skip that buddy during sync.
I better stop now before I come to the conclusion that everyone should get a unique, universal and portable phone number when they are born that they can use their whole life.