What Can’t You Browse?
Lately I’ve been thinking about the limits of browsers. The limits largely live in the address bar, not the multiverse of the content area. There are all kinds of things right on the phone that you can’t browse. Your contacts, for example.
What would it be like if you could browse your contact list? The way I’d want to do it would be to have a list of names, each one of which would be a link. The link wouldn’t always be the same thing, though.
Some of the people in my contact list are there because of who they are, and some of them have web pages. So some of the links would be to web pages. Some of the people in my list don’t have web pages, and their links would just call them, if that’s mostly how I contact them, or maybe email or text them if that’s what I mostly do.
Some people in list are there because of what they are. The local representative of my insurance company, for example, is there because that’s his job. The link to his name on my contact page would bring me to a page about me — policy numbers, for example, and probably contact information not just for him, but for claims.
Some items in my list aren’t people at all; they’re companies. In some cases what I would want to link to would be my information, in some cases information about the company, and in some cases neither. If I were to shop for a car, for example, a few salespeople might temporarily inhabit my contact list. The important thing about them would be neither their names nor their companies, but the fact that I was shopping for a car. A link to some sort of model comparison would help me find the economy-class 300 horsepower, 200 mile-per-hour, 100 mile-per-gallon luxury SUV sports bus convertible I was looking for (see, this is why I hate shopping for cars…).
The point is that if you think of various kinds of information in your phone as browsable, categories start to blur. A contact can be many different things. Browsing encompasses all of them, and more. As David Weinberger says, Everything is Miscellaneous!
