Srcasm

When I am ready to head out for the night to the local watering hole or the amazing place that reminds me of my fraternity house basement, I send a quick message to Twitter to let people know where I’m going.  I have the policy that if I post it to Twitter, it’s open to anyone and that includes coming to hang out and grab a beer or dinner with friends.

One thing I’ve begun to realize though is that some people won’t come out unless I directly invite them.  Whether it’s that they feel that they are unwelcomed or they would like a personal, “Hey, I’m thinking about you and I would enjoy your company,” is up in the air.  I guess it differs for each person.

One thing is clear, we may be leaving people out of our lives by using services like Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook to blast out invites to hang out instead of the more traditional methods like telephones, email or SMS messages.  What do you think?  Are we losing touch with our humanity?  Do we feel that we no longer need to communicate in a one-on-one world with micro-blogging and one-to-many services?  Should we be focusing on those closer to us by sending them personal invitations or notes instead of expecting them to check the large flood of information that’s contained on the internet?

I can’t stress enough how important it is to not stress.  Not only does stress make your life harder on you and everyone around you but it can cause health issues as well.  High blood pressure, depression, diabetes and worse, death.  That’s why this weekend, Magda and I decided to unwind with some new friends down on the Chesapeake.

I started out the weekend by unwinding at IndyHall with some great friends.  The guys over there sure know how to work hard and play hard.  A few hour meet and greet turned into business talk (as it always does) but it wasn’t nearly as stressful as the rest of the work week.  After that, Alex and I went out to have a few drinks with old college buddies.  Again, relieve the stress in unconventional ways (drinking!).  We ended the night by trying a new drink that Alex swears was a prank put on by our friends at Triumph Brewery.  (I on the other hand highly recommend it.)

Then came Saturday, the amazing and stupendous relaxation day.  Magda and I headed down to meet up with @iconjohn and @jonnygoldstein on @iconjohn’s boat.  He has a beautiful 34 foot Sabre MK1 and boy did we sail.  Below are a couple of videos from our sail/motor around the bay near Rock Hall, MD.

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Today it seems like there is a never-ending supply of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), contact relationship sites (Plaxo and Salesforce), email address books (Gmail and Yahoo) but what about when I need to reach Alex from my cell phone and I forgot to put his number in? What if I never even had Alex’s number? What if he’s available via IM right now and doesn’t want phone calls? These are all great questions and I think I have an idea or a solution…

Aggregated address book system

On the top level, it’s simply a way of pulling in contacts from all over the globe. Bring your friends from Facebook (with their IM name, email and phone numbers), your business contacts from LinkedIn (with their title, company, email and website) and your main homeboys from Gmail (with their emails, phone numbers and whatever else you’d like to include) and pull them all together into one simple, online and offline-capable address book. Add the ability access this service via SMS or WAP site and you have yourself an always-on address book system

To sweeten the deal, add the ability to not only have presence detection (such as if the person is on Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger or simple available via text message) but also allow masked-communication with users. This could use a service like Jajah to connect the two parties.

On top of these amazing features (which are already out there, they just need to be mashed together), offer both natural language search (i.e. call Joe Schmoe at home) as well as opt-in and opt-out communication methods. For example, say I am “friends” with Joe on Twitter. Twitter knows that Joe’s phone number is 555-1337 (this would take some work with Twitter to allow this in their API with an opt-in option) but I don’t know that Joe’s number is that. I text 232665 (ADBOOK) or visit m.addbook.com from my mobile and type in “call Joe Schmoe’s mobile”. Within seconds, Joe Schmoe is notified that I’d like to get in touch with him. He can simply reply to a text message with Y or N as to whether he’d like to talk and voila, with a Y response, Joe and I are connected (neither of us know the other’s phone number).

See how helpful that could be? Now get out there, and someone, set this up as I have a lot of contacts I’d like to reach.