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Net Prophet - by Dylan Tweney

August 31, 1998

Keeping up with the Joneses is tough for Net directories


The Internet is filled with phone and e-mail directories. Most are pathetically inaccurate.

As a test, I looked up my name and address using three leading Web directories.

Lycos' WhoWhere service, at http://www.whowhere.com, couldn't find my phone number at all. However, it did fairly well with my e-mail address -- it listed my most current address at the top, along with a few obsolete ones.

Yahoo's People Search, at http://people.yahoo.com, fared worse -- it located four e-mail addresses for me, only one of which I've used at all in the past two years. Its phone directory found an old number that the phone company disconnected when I moved a year and a half ago.

The phone directory that returned the most accurate information was Excite's People Finder, at http://www.excite.com, which draws its information from AT&T's AnyWho service. Excite also did respectably with my e-mail address, returning the same addresses as WhoWhere -- which is the source of Excite's e-mail database.

Adding to the problem

I repeated the tests with the names of several friends, with mixed results. No directory consistently returned accurate results.

The problem isn't technological -- it's social. People simply move too fast for these databases to keep up. Your company's internal directories no doubt have the same problem.

There's been a sudden spurt of sites that aim to solve the problem by letting individuals create and maintain their own entries in proprietary directories. Such companies, however, are adding to the problem, not fixing it.

I've been bombarded recently with press releases from these companies. One of the first to come across my desk was Qcommand. You can find it online at http://www.qcommand.com, where you can sign up for a "Q code," attach personal contact information to your code, or look up other people by their Q codes.

The system is simple -- everyone who signs up gets a numerical code (mine is 2057) and an alphanumeric code (mine is "Dylan").

Although Qcommand's system is easy to use, I've now got one more address to remember -- a Q code.

Distributed directories

The problem for Qcommand and companies like it is that it wants to be what it can never be: a central directory of all humans on the Web.

Unfortunately for these companies, the only way that can happen is for one of them to become a monopoly. Without monopolistic control of all public directory information, these services will only be able to provide partial -- and thus unreliable -- information. And if no one is relying on these databases, who's going to bother updating his or her own listings?

A much more likely solution to the directory problem isn't a product or a service -- it's a protocol. By defining a common directory access standard, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) has made it possible for corporate and public directories to cross-reference one another, pulling information from another directory when it's not available in a local one.

LDAP won't create one universal super-directory. But it will make it possible for companies or individuals to effectively link directories, creating ad-hoc collections of disparate directories. For example, my own personal address book could access the phone company's directory, a corporate online phone book, and a list of e-mail addresses at my local ISP -- all from a single interface.

This won't result in a single, perfectly accurate, perfectly current directory -- but it will be as close as we can get in a free market.


Dylan Tweney (dylan@infoworld.com) has been covering the Internet since 1993. He edits InfoWorld's intranet and Internet-commerce product reviews.


Previous columns by Dylan Tweney

Real estate site aims to make a home sweet home on the Internet
August 24, 1998

Comparison shopping takes the punch out of online branding game
August 17, 1998

No mere bookstore, Amazon.com wants to be an online retail giant
August 10, 1998


Every column since August, 1997


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