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Greening-Digital / constellate

An experiment in shared address books
Apache License 2.0
3 stars 3 forks source link

Download profiles as vcards #106

Closed mrchrisadams closed 8 months ago

mrchrisadams commented 3 years ago

When you look at someone's profile one way to make the info accessible, and useful offline is to make it easy to add to your own device's address book.

This provides a nice UX for mobile, as info then easy to act upon.

This package is the first one I saw, if we want to make this feature something we make available in the front end, as opposed to being an API feature.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/vcards-js

Why would this be useful?

The short version is that if you care more about facilitating communication off-platform. Comms clients, from email, to whatsapp, to ... well, ANY messaging app really - all rely on the address book, so adding it to here means we can take advantage of all that cool functionality.

This is opposed to the way LinkedIn and others incentivize using their platform for comms - largely because we're not trying to monetize attention with ads.

I also feel from a user experience point of view, having someone's deets in your phone for example feels more like an actual connection than a link just existing in another org's database.

This blog post a while back explaining access an address book is useful should provide some more background - it explains how Whatsapp ended up being a threat to Facebook for similar reasons around the "unbundling" of a social graph via the address book:

https://awmug.wordpress.com/2018/03/18/why-i-think-you-would-have-bought-whatsapp-if-you-were-facebook-mapped/

EvanHahn commented 8 months ago

Just opened #241 to address this.

EvanHahn commented 8 months ago

I think this was addressed by #241. Closing.