After all, we don’t send emails to email addresses. We send emails to friends, family, colleagues, partners, bosses. We mostly don’t read corporate blogs, we read the blogs of our friends, idols, and enemies. We don’t send instant messages to aliases, but to significant others, co-conspirators, and other people.

What this means for Thunderbird’s future is still to be figured out, but I thought I’d mention it today because I saw this story from InfoWorld about a Yahoo initiative called oneConnect, which seems to be along similar lines of thought as my own, including interoperation with various social networking to build up a fuller picture of one’s true relationships, which is richer than any one provider’s perspective.

There’s one major distinction between my vision and the one oneConnect seems to promote, which is that I think individuals should be at the center of their own “social manifold”, not Yahoo, or Yahoo/Microsoft, or Google, or any other central party. And that’s a place where I think Mozilla’s approach, whether through the use of desktop software or hosted storage of client-side encrypted data, is the approach worth advocating. Individuals should be able to choose to trust providers to store that data for them, or not. And they should be able to change their mind as to the state of those trust relationships, especially given this heady M&A frenzy.

In particular, consider the implications of something like Yahoo’s oneConnect and the possible Yahoo/Microsoft merger, given this other story from Fortune about Microsoft’s approach to data portability.

Josh Quittner summarizes his perspective as: “My contacts should belong to me”. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Anyway — in Dopplr, contacts aren’t called friends (thank you!), they’re called “fellow travelers”. I liked the name, and mentioned it to Emily. She knows a lot more about words than I do, and thought it was a funny choice, as the term used to be a code name for communist sympathizers. After 30 seconds of searching, I haven’t seen any hint on google that the etymology was a factor in the choice.

At first, it seems like an awful lot of duplication — the core is basically a clone of del.icio.us. The biggest difference seems to be that it seems to think of URLs as handles to actual bibliographic entries, which are extracted at bookmarking time from the pages being bookmarked, and the bibliographic handle is the “primary key” (I wonder what happens if two URLs point to the same biblio entry). The analysis works on a few major sites so far, including pubmed and Amazon. Having the bibliographic data then lets them do integration with citation management software (like EndNote). If enough of one’s sources are found online, then I can certainly see that as being a useful tool — I spent way too much time entering LaTeX bibliographies over the years.

But is the new feature “worth” having a segregated social bookmarking service (and data pool) just for scientists?

First, will it work? Assuming that the system is bootstrapped, my guess is: probably. The social aspect of del.icio.us, i.e. the tag-sharing, link-exploring and folksonomy-building will probably work just fine in a “vertical” community such as scientists or lawyers (assuming a high enough degree of participation). The profession-specific shared bookmarking service could very well make folksonomy development go a tad faster, within well-defined communities with a shared jargon (although I feel that jargon semantics don’t carry across subfields, with one field’s definition of a term quite at odds with another’s). Paul Kedrosky will be happy to see another vertical search concept (if he doesn’t know about it already!).

Apart from the duplication of effort, which is only theoretically bad, one obvious downside of the verticalization of the tool is that people doing interdisciplinary work (e.g. scientific lawyers, aka patent lawyers) will probably suffer from the compartmentalization of the meta-data — but they’re used to it by now.

Most interesting to me is the notion that the folks at Nature may have figured out a possible new feature/concept for systems like del.icio.us. Maybe it’s worth considering the possibilities that follow from doing more in-depth analysis of the “stuff” being bookmarked, and extracting the key parts of the content of interest, as opposed to focusing (as technologists would naturally do) on the “simple bit”, i.e. the URL. After all, the URL isn’t what’s interesting — it’s the stuff in the page that is.

As an example, this morning I bookmarked the page on gawker that was my introduction to the Starbucks corporate anthem (warning, it’s depressing as hell). I bookmarked the page because “it was there” — but it would be nice for the system to know that what’s key about that page is the link to the MP3 file — not just the words that Gawker uses to introduce it. If others have bookmarked another page that happens to include the same link, del.icio.us wouldn’t let me know about it. A version of something like Connotea that knew about link structures might.

As my kids say, very instering.