By | By Christopher Mims
What if all of us had our own search engine for everyone with
whom we have ever come in contact, no matter how trivial our
interaction? And what if it already knew who they were, and served
as a master contacts database for pretty much the entire world? And
what if this service lived on all our devices, organizing the world
according to people rather than places or things? In the car, you
would tell it who you plan to meet. On your wrist, it's a way to
never forget a name. On your phone, well, it's your phone.
That is the vision of Ankur Jain, the 24-year-old founder of
Humin, who calls it a "social OS"--something like what Facebook has
tried and in some respects failed to create.
For now, Humin's most visible expression is as a clever
replacement for the Phone app on your iPhone. But that, says Mr.
Jain, is just the beginning. "Step one in this process is, you've
got to solve a problem people care about in daily life," says Mr.
Jain.
Humin scours your email, social networks and calendars, building
a master contacts list of everyone who is willing to feed it their
information. It also streams out emails to the uninitiated in your
contacts, asking them to confirm details already stored in dozens
and eventually thousands of address books. This can be a little
creepy for some people.
The result is a new kind of responsive phone and contacts app.
Pop open your current phone app on Apple's iOS and you get an
alphabetical list of names, a system pretty much unchanged since
the arrival of cellphones. Humin replaces your phone
app--completely. You can curate lists of the people you call most.
And you can use it as you would Facebook's People Search. You can
search for "friends of so and so," or by where someone lives, works
or studied, or even where you were when you met them.
Humin is a part of a larger phenomenon called contextual
computing, the most well-known example of which is Google Now,
which is prominent on Android phones as a sort of prediction
algorithm for what you'll want to know or do next. (It is also
available on the iPhone, but owing to Apple's rules the integration
isn't nearly as good.) Like Google Now, Humin aspires to automate
the organization of your social life: When you arrive in a new
city, a "card" pops up in Humin letting you know who you might want
to be in touch with there. Unlike Google Now, Humin explicitly
doesn't aspire to organize other dimensions of your life, like your
calendar, says Mr. Jain.
Where this is all going is pretty clear, and we've already seen
hints of it in Google's operating system for smartwatches, which is
also based on Google Now. Rather than spending all our time
interacting with devices full of icons and apps to accomplish
particular tasks, more and more those devices will reach out to us,
like digital butlers, giving us what we want when we need it and
prompting us with clarifying questions to do their job better.
To get a better handle on that future, at the same time I have
been using Humin, I have been plowing through a small avalanche of
other recently released apps designed to take the data in my email,
calendar and contacts and make them more relevant, useful and
immediate. Apps whose dominant interaction model is the calendar,
not contacts, including Sunrise, Mynd, EasilyDo and Tempo crowd my
home screen and alerts tab, each with a different opinion about how
to tell me whom I should talk to, when, and how I should go about
transporting myself to their last known location.
I thought installing all of them at once would be redundant, but
what I discovered is that each has its utility: Sunrise is good at
ingesting calendar items from other apps, Mynd is as good or better
than Google Now at knowing traffic conditions and alerting me to
when I need to leave for my next meeting, EasilyDo tells me when my
packages have arrived, and Tempo is the most personal
assistant-like, handing me a dossier for each day the moment I wake
up.
All of these apps are enriched by the growing depth of my
contacts list enabled and encouraged by Humin, plus all the
(unintended) chatter between them that happens because they are
accessing my calendar. Even Google Now is getting better--it has
more contacts and calendar items from which to draw.
Sensitive to the privacy implications of an app that aspires to
know everything about everywhere I go and everyone with whom I've
ever conversed, Mr. Jain assures me that his company has developed
a strict privacy code they call "Humin Rights." Its technological
component is a clever hack. "Your private data never touches our
servers," Mr. Jain says. Nearly all of the processing of all my
data is done on my phone itself, and only my contacts are backed up
in the cloud.
The other apps I tried require the same level of trust I put in
Google, and I suspect that they too may someday have to adopt a
policy like Humin's to not feel too creepy or invasive. Still, the
trade-off for the kind of future Humin and other apps embody will
require even more trust in third parties that haven't always proved
up to the task.
The sum of all these contextual apps is, for now, a kind of
ambient awareness of the contents of my day that I suppose more
organized and less distractible people have known for years. But
the engineers and CEOs I talked to insist this is but the first
version of what contextual computing will look like. In the future,
"having to worry about when and how things will be done will
disappear," says Max Wheeler, CEO of Mynd.
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