What if you could update your details on your own phone, and it automatically updated all your chosen friends’ phones?

In April 2003, after four years of having the most fun time of my life with my friends in college, it was finally time to say goodbye. Four years had flown by with more volleyball than engineering, and we had spent all our time in togetherness and fun, rather than in competition. Some of us were going to study further, some had a job, and some had yet to find a job. Some would stay on in the same city, some would move out, and yet others left the country to go abroad. But as they say, your friends in college are your friends for life, and it certainly felt that way to us 21-year-olds, so we never imagined that we’d ever lose touch with one another.

In the years to follow, as life moved us from one place to another and one phone number to another, and as we lost our phones and our email passwords and got busy in our own careers, we gradually lost touch with one another. So much so that today, we hardly know which of us is married, who lives where, and indeed what we all are doing with our lives.

How did this happen? Apart from the general, tempting explanation that we were all too busy to care about each other, I believe there are specific technological, behavioral explanations too. Understanding the process of losing touch in the modern, smartphone-wielding world is the key to preventing it and solving this problem. Here are some aspects of our behaviour that I think might give us a clue:

  1. We are all heavily dependent on our phones. In specific, our address books. Increasingly, our phone’s address book has come to dominate all other methods of storing our contacts – nowhere else is our entire universe of relationships more comprehensively represented. From our family to our plumber, all our connections are concentrated in our phone.
  2. Our address books don’t recognize people. To our phones, our contacts are merely alphabets and numerals, with no identity. I may have a phone number under “Mom”, but my phone does not know whose contact it really is. If someone else tomorrow starts using that number after my mom gives it up, my phone will still have that number under “Mom”.
  3. We take our address books for granted. We don’t keep it updated, or well-maintained, because it’s a lot of effort to check whether each phone number, each email address and each postal address is still accurate. We often meet people twice and enter their new number or new email address under a different name, while an earlier entry may have been under a nickname.
  4. We have no way to update others’ address books when we change our details. Sure, I could send an email to a hundred people and risk being sent straight to their spam folder. I could send free messages on Whatsapp – if my connections are there. I could send SMS messages too, except that they cost money, especially for international messages. I certainly don’t want to be putting my number up on Facebook. And they will still need to do the work of noting my number down in their phones. There is NO elegant way to let my friends know that the number under my name on their phone no longer belongs to me.
  5. In 2014, losing a phone is still a death sentence to our address book. And a lot of us lose/damage our phones at some point. There are limited contacts-backup options available, but while some of them are platform-restrictive (iCloud), others are highly intrusive and often malfunction while syncing. Besides, you can’t do much else with them – they’re just a bin where you put all your contacts and keep on syncing with them for the rest of your life.

That’s how the story of 6degrees began.

What if you could update your details on your own phone, and it automatically updated all your chosen friends’ phones?

What if, if you lost your phone, you could just buy a new phone and magically see all your contacts there – all neat and up-to-date?

What if your phone could recognize people, and when many of your contacts actually refer to the same person, suggest them to you for instant merging?

That’s how the story of 6degrees began.

P.S: the 6degrees website is available at www.get6degrees.com