Well actually a whole bunch of things are happening on the servers.
First of all, we start off by “normalizing” all your contacts’ contact points, for instance their phone numbers. So if you enter 0692345678 or 0033692345678, or even +33 (0) 6 92 34 56 78 (office mobile), we will work out the number behind that is (in E134 standard format) 33692345678. This means that if someone with that number registers as an ON User, then we can assume you know them and either ask them if they want to add you to their address book, or if you are already in it, link you up via your public (everyone else) world. It also means that wherever you are in the world, and however you entered the info, you will be able to call them.
We do the same thing with any other contact point you can validate (IM’s, Facebook credentials, emails, …).
We go one step further to check numbers against third party databases to see if the number is mobile or fixed. If it is a mobile number, then you can sms it. If it isn’t, you can’t. Also, if two contacts have the same mobile number, we will suggest you merge them, whereas if they share a fixed line or fax number, we won’t.
We go through addresses, and attempt to break them out into a standard format (road, town, county, country, zipcode). This will soon allow you to see who happens to work or live close to where you currently are, or help you with directions on getting there.
We work out a “home” location for your contact. Shortly, this will enable us to tell you when they are in a different timezone to you what time it is for them, or if they are in a different city, what the weather is.
We check first names to see if we can identify them as being unambiguously female or male. This will soon allow us to set the gender of your contact, and then give you more “human” messages (“she tried calling,” or “you called her”).
We make it easy for you to look for duplicates. This, for instance, will do basic stuff such as checking that John Doe is the same person as Doe John. But if we can find any other matching info (same number, same address, …) , then we may even suggest that JD is the same as Doe John.
We use this same process when you import your twitter of facebook contacts, to help you link up Delft26 with John Doe, so that you can then access them in one click.
And then some more techy stuff. We associate hash-codes with each of your contacts, enabling us to see whether they were changed since they were last synced, even if the change occurred through a third party service that we don’t know about.
And of course, during this process, we back-up all of your contacts on a web-server that is securely hosted, and that only you can access with your login and password. You can then download all these contacts easily when you change phone, or access your phone book from any web browser.
Lastly, we make sure we record correctly which worlds you have associated a given contact with, to ensure that we only ever share the information you want with them.
As with everything else within ON, we are doing all this to make your life better. We remember that all this data is yours. You can choose to delete any part of it whenever you want, and we will not keep a trace of it.
