SuperSync

Every­day, we man­age large num­bers of con­tacts across a vari­ety of devices. For exam­ple, I have a PDA, a phone (which hap­pen to both be the same device so that syn­chro­niza­tion is instant), a work PC, a home desk­top, and a lap­top. In order to prop­erly keep all my data in sync, I need to hook up each of those devices on a one to one basis. Prob­lems occur when con­tent falls out of sync on a device.

One thing all those devices have in com­mon, how­ever, is that they are all con­nected in one way or another to a net­work, and can access the Inter­net. As the net­work becomes more and more cen­tral to our daily lives, why is it that no one has come up with a solu­tion that allows for syn­chro­niza­tion on a cen­tral device (prob­a­bly a server sit­ting on the Internet)?

In the case I am high­light­ing, the cen­tral server would be a repos­i­tory of basic infor­ma­tion: con­tact info. How­ever, the chal­lenge comes from the fact that it would be able to syn­chro­nize in real-time with­out involv­ing any actual extra work on my part.

The sys­tem I am describ­ing would have some key fea­tures. First of all, it would have to be easy to use and access. A sim­ple screen would allow me to enter basic data on a sin­gle per­son: name, email address and phone num­ber. Once entered, the sys­tem would fire off an email to the per­son so they can add the rest of the data them­selves. This would ensure that the infor­ma­tion is up to date at the time of entry. Every so often, the sys­tem would dou­ble check with the per­son to ensure that their data is up to date.

Devices like my phone, PDA, or com­puter would then use some pull tech­nol­ogy to get their infor­ma­tion up to date on a reg­u­lar basis (every hour? every day? every week?) and update them­selves automatically.

All the com­po­nents seem to be here to devise such a sys­tem. For starters, build­ing a cen­tral repos­i­tory is largely an issue of proper data­base man­age­ment. Of course, there is a need for a proper secu­rity wrap­per to ensure con­fi­den­tial­ity but it seems to me that this is also available.

The auto-update fea­ture would mir­ror tech­nol­ogy already built into the major oper­at­ing sys­tems (be it Win­dows Update, Red­Hat Linux Up2Date, or OSX. The last part that needs to be agreed upon is a con­sis­tent way to push this infor­ma­tion across all devices, allow­ing for sim­i­lar func­tion­al­ity on phones and PDAs too.

Granted, this cen­tral­iza­tion of con­tact may not please every­one. As a result, the soft­ware should allow users to point to a dif­fer­ent cen­tral server (hence remov­ing the pos­si­bil­ity for one com­pany con­trol­ling all this infor­ma­tion). Sys­tems like Microsoft pass­port have failed in the past because they assumed that con­trol should remain in the hands of a sin­gle com­pany. A way to get around this would be to use a web ser­vice approach that would sync data across mul­ti­ple servers (a server admin­is­tra­tor would be able to set lev­els of access to the fed­er­a­tion and a user would also be able to cus­tomize whether they want that infor­ma­tion to be made public.)

The end game here is a sys­tem that would allow for syn­chro­niza­tion of data with min­i­mal involve­ment from the end user (mean­ing the devices would be smart enough to dis­trib­ute the infor­ma­tion amongst them­selves once they have been reg­is­tered as trusted enti­ties by the user). We’re start­ing to see some of that with prod­ucts like Apple iSync but those still rely on a desk­top metaphor, con­trol of the sys­tem by a sin­gle ven­dor (in this case, Apple), and some level of user involve­ment in order to sync data up (even though con­nec­tiv­ity between devices can eas­ily be estab­lished with things like BlueTooth).

I’m dub­bing this con­cept SuperSync.

Does any­one out there know of a sys­tem like the one I am describ­ing? If so, please feel free to con­tact me.

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