Unified Contact Manager for Multi-Service Data Consolidation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current social networking services lack an efficient method for managing contact information across multiple platforms, requiring users to manually visit each site to retrieve and update contact details, which is tedious and inefficient.
Innovation Solution
A contact information manager that communicates with multiple social networking services over a network to retrieve, process, and unify contact information, allowing users to view and manage contact details from various services in a single interface, including contact identities, communication modes, and availability status.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If users manually visit each social networking service to retrieve contact information, then contact information can be obtained from multiple services, but the process becomes tedious and time-consuming
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a contact information manager as an intermediary system that automatically retrieves contact information from multiple social networking services. This manager acts as a mediator between the user and multiple services, consolidating contact information from various sources without requiring the user to manually visit each service, thus resolving the contradiction between obtaining complete contact information and spending excessive time on manual retrieval
Solution Approach 2:
The contact information manager enables self-service by automatically performing the retrieval, consolidation, and management of contact information from multiple services. The system autonomously handles the tedious tasks of visiting different services, extracting contact details, and maintaining updated information, eliminating the need for users to manually engage in these time-consuming operations
2Ease of operation
If users manually retrieve and store contact information locally, then contact information can be managed, but the process is tedious and inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The contact information manager serves as an intermediary that handles all manual processing tasks automatically. It retrieves contact information from multiple services, processes and standardizes the data, and maintains local storage updates without user intervention. This intermediary system dramatically improves ease of operation by eliminating tedious manual retrieval and processing while minimizing the time users need to spend on contact information management
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates and maintains local copies of contact information from multiple social networking services. Instead of requiring users to manually copy and paste information from each service, the contact information manager automatically generates and updates local copies, making contact information management efficient and straightforward while reducing the time required for manual processing
3Adaptability or versatility
If contact information is maintained separately at multiple services, then each service provides its own directory, but unified management across services is not achieved
Solution Approach 1:
The contact information manager is designed as a universal system capable of managing contact information across multiple different social networking services. It provides multi-functional capabilities including automatic retrieval from various services, consolidation of contact data, unified storage management, and coordinated updates across all services. This universal approach enables adaptable multi-service contact management without requiring separate management systems for each service, thereby reducing overall complexity while maintaining versatility
Data Source
AI summary
Via a graphical user interface, a user can select multiple different services (e.g., remote repositories such as websites) having contact information associated with the user's contacts (e.g., friends, Internet buddies, friends of friends, acquaintances, etc.). Based on the selection of multiple services, the contact information manager communicates with the multiple services over a network to retrieve the contact information associated with the user's friends (i.e., contacts). The retrieved contact information can specify identities of the multiple contacts as well as different communication modes (e.g., phone, e-mail, addresses information, whereabouts information, etc.) for communicating with the user's contacts. The contact information manager processes the contact information from the multiple services and initiates display of the contact information in a unified listing. Accordingly, via the contact information manager, a user can more efficiently manage contact information obtained from multiple disparate locations over a network.