Ask HN: Where is my cloud addressbook?

[frossie]

All my info lives happily in the cloud- notes, to-do lists, documents, photos, music - except for my darn addressbook - you know, name, phone number, address, email, group. Now I am not looking for social networking solutions - what I wish for is:

1. An online way of managing addresses with a decent UI (no, Google Contacts is not a decent UI).

2. A way of sharing items with family members (so only one spouse has to enter the number of the plumber)

3. Decent offline clients (ideally sync, at least read-only) for the usual suspects - iPhone, linux (akonadi?), whatever Mac/Windows worlds use.

4. Web based import - eg. my electrican's website exporting their vcard/hcard so I would just click on an icon when browsing their website (like the RSS feed monitor) to import their data in my address book. Hell, maybe when they move their new address would automatically push out.

None of this stuff is rocket science these days, so where is it? At least is there a good solution for 1-3? (I realise 4 would require some kind of standard and viral uptake). What do people here use? Is everybody tied to their OS/mobile-specific addressbooks, or are they depending on stuff like Facebook/LinkedIn? I don't want to have to join Facebook to look up my plumber's number.

PS. Sorry if this is covered before, closest thread I was able to find was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544738 which had a good OP but comments petered out. After reading the comments I am tempted to add the suggestion I found there of:

5. Deal with multi-person addresses like husband and wife at the same location.

[ganley]

I've looked pretty hard into this, and the prevailing opinion seemed to be that the trouble isn't technical, it's social. Do you really want your friends putting your contact info in the cloud? In order for this to work, you really need a mechanism for people to approve sharing their info, control what gets exposed, etc. If you built such a mechanism, it has some obvious advantages - e.g. someone can update their own address and have the change be automatically propagated - but it also makes it much more complicated. It's doable, but established social sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) have such a head start that you'd have to worry about them stomping you from day one.

[frossie → ganley]

Well I think there are two different problems - personal and professional addresses. While I may not want my info public in the cloud, my plumber (for the sake of argument) presumably does not feel the same way, because his details are on his website. So problem #1 is getting the kind of free-format contact info you find in the "Contact Us" sections of websites into my addressbook. There is no technical barrier here - vcards/hcards are a decent but under-utilised standard.

Problem #2 (personal information) you are right, it needs restriction. But a household is probably quite happy to share addresses - not in the sense of each member having an identical addressbook, but in the sense of sharing some common groups - just like sharing calendars works now.

I just can't understand the seeming lack of interest in this area - address info is the one untapped area that everybody uses. But there must be some stunning lack of interest in it - which would also explain why the Google Contacts UI is so poor.

[jcapote]

Get a google apps account for a domain, it has shared contacts. Bonus: If you have an android phone, it'll integrate seamlessly...

[frossie → jcapote]

Okay, that would solve my personal problem (so would seting up an LDAP server), but for the general population, getting a Google Apps account is using a canon to smite a gnat.

I was hoping somebody would say "There's a start-up for that...." :-)

[catch404]

    2. A way of sharing items with family members (so only one spouse has to enter the number of the plumber)

Having more than one spouse must make it hard to keep track of things :)