BarCampDelhi Session: Re-Inventing the Wheel of Personal Information Management With a New TWIST - Mir Nazim, Dipankar Sarkar

Despite the title, it was an interesting talk by Mir Nazim. He proposes an online Personal Information (contacts, appointments) Management system that can act as a social networking tool by allowing various people to sync their data. Say, you're a CEO and you wonder if you can have a lunch appointment some time next week with your VC but don't want to call up the busy guy - you simply log on to this app and look up when he's free. This application allows for varying levels of exposure of your personal information to your contacts so unlike an entrepreneur seeking funding, you'll have privileged access to your VC's appointments because he considers you a safe contact.

As Mir mentioned, none of the popular calendar or contact management applications such as Chandler, Thunderbird or Outlook offer this kind of feature because their data stays offline and cannot be synched across people. Neat idea. Though I foresee distribution and trust as two major issues. It also needs to be super easy in terms of user experience. In the presentation I saw a slide mentioning date and time in unfriendly format of "10-March 1600 hours". Hey, how about displaying it as: "this Friday (10th) at 4 pm." Or in other cases as "coming Tuesday (14th) at 9am" and "Thursday (16th Mar) at 5pm".

Mir Nazim's blog, his company - Xensoft
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