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+++ title = "date ranges on contact info (address, phone, email)" summary = "Addresses are not owned. They are leased [...] People move houses all the time, so their address changes. In the same way, people change digital addresses like phone numbers [...] "X was using this phone number between 2011-01-01 and 2015-06-01." For messaging archives you can now reliably dereference a phone number to a contact name, without having to worry about who has the phone number now." date = 2019-08-20T02:09:00-05:00 source = "https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/102648053339382526" tags = ["wrong"] +++
why has no one thought of attaching a date range to when certain contacts held certain phone numbers or email addresses or physical addresses or whatever
it would solve the issue of reconstructing history
wanna have a thread of all your messages with a person whomst has changed phone numbers but you know someone else has the number now? well Now You Can
checking my understanding is of your post: so uh like I can say "Eugen rochko had (420)666-6969 between x and u dates" so I would remember that if I went back to look?
yeah exactly
on a ui level it would allow a user to say "show me all the messages i've ever had with eugen", but combining threads from different phone numbers
or if applied to the fediverse "show me my mentions from this contact, bearing in mind that they migrated 20 times"
it's more useful with a nickname/petname/addressbook system that largely hasn't been implemented yet bc everyone just uses webfinger for user@domain addressing that they expect never to change
put another way: what if instead of owning an address, you leased that address, and your lease had a start date and potential end date
tenancy is not and should not be treated as permanent
refinement
Addresses are not owned. They are leased.
Compare to physical street addresses. People move houses all the time, so their address changes. In the same way, people change digital addresses like phone numbers. This makes it hell to reconstruct a conversation later based on your current contact listings. Do you keep that old number attached to that contact forever, even if you know they're not using it anymore? That's awkward because you wouldnt message that number anymore, it'd be a stranger.
The real issue is reuse of addresses. We don't really have to worry about date ranges of email addresses because email providers generally don't reassign usernames. But it might be nice to still be able to mark an email as implicitly "inactive". So what do we do about all this?
Assign date ranges to contact addressing methods.
Start date, end date. "X was using this phone number between 2011-01-01 and 2015-06-01." For messaging archives you can now reliably dereference a phone number to a contact name, without having to worry about who has the phone number now.
- Assign date ranges of when an address was used
- Mark certain method(s) as primary
- Display name is better than forcing people to use first/last. Allow optional markup of name parts, but name should be single text entry field and separate from other metadata like given/family/middle/etc.
- Arbitrary key-value pairs for misc info that isn't necessarily structured. But structure helps wherever possible.
Prior art:
- vcard. UGH.
- Monica. a great improvement but still kinda limited