a different concept about connecting to people

Many of us have emails, facebook contacts, twitter accounts, delicious bookmarks... All of these tools are important, and they help order our lives in significant ways.

But I would think that these emails, facebook contacts, etc.. should be thought of as prostheses - things that help us connect to the wider world out there, and help us connect to other people. But when we do connect with other people, we are connecting with the emails, and facebook profiles of other people, not to the people per se. What we are, when we link to emails and all, is that we are linking a prostheses to another prostheses, one degree removed from the reality of the person that we are connecting to.

I would like to think that there could be another way about looking at the social connectivity that we have across the web. I would re-imagine that we are connecting to people, not to prostheses, and a whole suite of applications could be conceptualised based on that ideal. We connect to people, and its just that people are enveloped in our own webs of applications and devices, and we need to recognise that fact. It would be so much better, if we could organise our contacts in a people-centric sort of way, and linking emails and facebook profiles to that person, instead of the other way around.

A possible application could be like this...
(name1)
(gmail)
(msn)
(facebook)
(blog)

(name2)
(gmail)
(facebook)
(blog)
(twitter)
(delicious)
...

and so on... instead of

(email)
(name)
...

Would it be possible?

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