Cambridge (GUARDIAN NEWS SERVICE): I have a phone that will take photographs, function as a GPS device, store 8Gb of music, access the internet, run three different sorts of messaging system, make ordinary phone calls, fit in a shirt pocket ... all that it won't do is keep a phonebook. Keeping contacts accessible is one of the few things that even the most primitive phone used to be able to do without trouble.
But not this Nokia. In my attempts to synchronise with Google contacts it has fluctuated between storing 900 contacts and 256. The right number is something like 500, and of course the 250 contacts that it has lost include most of the really vital ones.
On my previous phone, a Sony Ericsson, there was a wonderful piece of shareware called MyPhone Explorer which kept a reliable synchronisation between Google Calendar and the contacts that I kept in Thunderbird. But it won't run with modern Nokia phones. They come with their own hideous slow and clumsy software. It only synchronises with Outlook or the Windows Address Book, one of which I don't have, and the other of which is useless; I believe it also synchronises with Lotus Notes, which I both don't have and is useless.
The other thing that I don't have (though it would be useful) is the time and patience to poke new contacts directly into the phone, using my forefinger one letter at a time. I prefer to add contact details at a proper keyboard. Since I work regularly at three keyboards - desktop, laptop and wherever I happen to be in the office - I need to be able to putnew contacts somewhere accessible from all of them, which, unless I am crazy, means somewhere in the cloud. That ends up as Google Contacts. They don't work very well either.
Google Contacts is one of those numerous fringe bits of Google which will be great some day, but until then are full of irritating hesitations and inadequacies. It is cumbersome to import to and export from. There is no way to attach notes or meeting information to people; and if you try to access it directly from a phone that isn't running Google's own operating system, the process is so complicated that you might as well fish around in a pocket for the elusive scrap of paper on which the number you want might have been written down. This is the sort of thing from which computers aremeant to have delivered us.
Google Calendar syncs without trouble in many ways to lots of mobile phones, and to desktop calendars and there are two services - ZYB (zyb.com) and GooSync - which claim to be able to synchronise contacts between Googleand a mobile phone. Neither works reliably for me. For a couple of times one or the other may seem to function, but after that they will hang halfway through, and for every hang a duplicate is introduced, until I am looking once more at the 900-entry phone book.
This is all so grotesquely unlike the efficiency of most bits of the web that it must be significant. Of what? The answer comes when you look at the things that do work: money or sex. Corporations have solutions that work perfectly well. When I use the office BlackBerry, it will look up all of the information about all of the contacts to which I am supposed to have access, and it is not impossibly difficult to add new ones. If I used Outlook, and if the office also were plugged into it, I am sure that I could manage the same.
All of the private solutions are designed to make social networks: places where you meet old friends and hope to have sex with strangers.
Services like ZYB or Plaxo keep trying to map networks of friends, and all their activities, not just their address books. They are part of the world in which the screen becomes a window into an eternal cocktail party. What is much harder to find is private and personal information sharing, where my addresses are mine alone, but are available to me wherever I am.
It isn't technically difficult: as I said, there's a program that does it very well on Sony Ericsson phones. But that is maintained by one man, on the donations he gets for it. In the long run, all of our information will be forced into social and corporate networks, because they will be the only things that work.