First Look: Critical Path’s Contact-Centric Messaging

I stumbled across a press release [pointer from Christopher at Social Infrastructure, a new voice] about Critical Path’s New Memova Messaging Solutions for Service Providers that are contact-centric, rather than messaging-centric:

[from the Press Release]

Critical Path’s contact-centric approach puts contacts — rather than the email or messaging application — at the center of the consumer experience. This makes messaging services easier to use, enables consumers to share content amongst their preferred community, and provides complete control over which messages they receive. Leveraging the proven Memova Messaging platform, Universal Contacts and Digital Life help service providers to not only enhance the consumer experience, but also deliver new revenue-generating, value-added services. For example:

— Universal Contacts — With the Universal Contacts solution,

consumers can create safe online communities and communicate

more easily from any device or application. The user’s contact

list is centrally stored on the service provider’s network

server and can be integrated with any or all of their

applications, including email, instant messaging, text

messaging, VoIP, etc. The centralized contact list is also

universally accessible from any device, including PCs, mobile

phones and PDAs. Address books in all applications/devices are

automatically synchronized whenever new contacts are added or

updated. In an effort to eliminate spam and/or provide greater

parental controls, integrated anti-abuse technology enables

users to allow or block senders who are not in their universal

contact list. Users can create closed, safe online communities

by setting up “white lists” and “black lists” that control who

can contact them via Internet or mobile messaging.

— Digital Life — With the Digital Life solution, consumers can

easily exchange photos, videos, music and other multimedia

content with members of their online community. The multimedia

content is stored on the service provider’s network server and

is tied to the user’s universal contact list. The contact list

denotes which members of the list have access to what content.

Subscribers can easily publish content to their personal

blogs, Web sites or RSS feeds and share it with their online

community through email and other mobile messaging

applications. The Digital Life solution allows service

providers to grow online communities by taking advantage of

the growing trends in user-generated content, while enabling

consumers to reap the benefits of high-speed Internet

connectivity through interaction with rich media.

“In the past when subscribers had just one device — a PC — and one form of Internet communication — email — it made sense for the email application to be at the heart of it all. Today, however, messaging services need to be centered around the people subscribers want to communicate with — not the application,” said Donald Dew, CTO, Critical Path. “Already, we’re working with leading service providers in the U.S., Spain and Switzerland to implement contact-centric solutions, helping them to address important issues, such as spam and security, while providing a seamless user experience and reducing infrastructure costs.”

This is an example of the Web 2.0 social architecture beginning to bleed into messaging architecture. People are the center of the universe, not functions like email. The buddylist will slowly emerge as the central metaphor for human interaction, and the various forms of interaction that connect us together will be seen as secondary variations on the themes of communication (email, IM), coordination (to dos, calendars, project planning), and collaboration (shared documents, project blogging).

I have had some hints from folks inside of AOL that the upcoming releases of what has been called AIMSpace might incorporate some of this sort of buddylist-centric architecting of the user experience, but they aren’t saying much, yet.