Big Contacts offers a dedicated “global address book”. It is an amazing tool. You can access the address book in the context of the Big Contacts CRM application. You can also access via an API. That means you can mash it into other applications.

Today, Ajaxian has an article about 37 signal’s new product: Highrise. Highrise is also being positioned as a global address book.

I’ll leave you to judge which company offers a more useful CRM application - I guess it depends on your needs. As you are making your decision, the Big Contacts populated demo is certainly worth checking out.

In both cases, while the CRM application is cool, the broader concept is much more interesting.

The Great Refactoring

One way to think about this is a spreading of Service Orientated Architecture Service Oriented Architecture; charging from behind the firewall out into the open Internet. The delivery mechanism is REST. And all the old complexities of data migration and data synchronization are being solved by letting end users pick one service provider to give them key global services. An end user could say, for example, I want:

• Big Contacts to deliver my universal address book
• SXIP to be both my prefered authentication protocol and access control vendor
• Cogenz to be my bookmarking service
• Gmail to be my mail client
• Facebook to be my social network
• DabbleDb to be my database in the sky

If software is going to be provided as a service, it make sense to refactor some services out, and get rid of the synchronization problem.

What else is needed? Here are some ideas:

• File storage, complete with versioning and access control
• Global shared To Do lists
• Mapping services
• Printing Services
• Approval and Process Services
• Invoicing Services
• Payment Services

Many of these already exist. But now, with the advent of mashup platforms, such as my company, Teqlo, it is easier to understand how these services will be consumed by end users.

History is filled with the serendipitous confluence of major trends. These new, highly focused web services, combined with a Web 2.0 inspired desire by end users to take control of applications is about to meet up with platforms that let end users assemble their own applications. The result will change the way people work with the web. They will replace PCs with Personal Servers, assembled from refactored services and run on mashup platforms. This is going to be fun!