British Telecom is testing a "small world" phone directory service called SWORD. The pilot version is an internal directory of corporate BT phone numbers for use by BT employees. It tracks who calls whom and adjusts search results accordingly. It notes your social network of colleagues (people you have called or who have called you), and colleagues of your colleagues -- so if you look up "John Smith" and there are 500 John Smiths in the directory, those John Smiths who are your colleagues show up first, colleagues of colleagues show up next, and so on.
Here is BT's public-relations explanation of the service.
BT is considering a mobile-phone version of SWORD that can use customers' personal address books and calling patterns to populate a database of phone numbers, including those belonging to people who have not registered their numbers.
This is intriguing stuff, there are some useful ideas here and I hope they'll work out well. Unfortunately BT seems to have overlooked the key privacy and vulnerability issues that will concern users of such services, judging from the public relations article. If the firm doesn't clarify the issues for its customers and if it doesn't provide them appropriate feedback about personal information flow (and appropriate control over that flow) from the start, these products may be cursed with a cloud of Gmail-style hysteria.
In the meantime, I'd love to know how those BT employees are reacting to SWORD.
(Thanks to Reed Hedges for the link).
Posted by sean at Květen 02, 2004 09:14 PM | TrackBack (0)