My friend Chris sent me a change of address today, and included a vcard – so I went ahead and added a vcard to my address site (Yep, that’s the site I referred to another friend who asked for my s-mail address – and her response was “sheesh, can’t you just copy and paste your address – I had to click through!).
Vcard (or .vcd) is a standard format for addresses. Take a look here and see what your browser does with it. If it’s linked to your address book, it should just add itself.
So this got both of us thinking about addresses – and of course I’m always thinking about phone numbers. Chris’ suggestion was for a distributed .vcd server with multi-level security, sort of like pgp keyservers – so people you had listed would have access to other numbers than spam/telemarketers/etc.
But of course I’m thinking bigger than that.
Have a centralized agency, like icann (that hands out domain names, but hopefully with more accuracy and less hassles!) assign IP address-style identification numbers. You could either pay for a single number (or however many identity numbers you wanted) or a range of numbers (for an organization and its employees/positions)…
…sorry, I’m spending too long arguing with myself about all the problems (as well as benefits) of this approach. Maybe I’ll update this if I work anything else. Write to me with ideas. You know my address!