Those annoying multiple copies of contacts on your phone!

A few months ago, I visited China to speak to local technology companies about 6degrees. Landing there, I was quite apprehensive about many issues I was expecting to face. This was my first trip to China, and apart from being a vegetarian guy used to 30 degrees Celsius (local temperature was 8 degrees), I also didn’t speak Chinese. My co-founder Arun and I considered 6degrees to be quite an involved concept, and I was unsure if the Chinese market would accept the use case we were offering to them. The challenge: To clearly communicate to them the problems we were trying to solve.

And immediately, there was a problem.

On the morning of day one, NOBODY I met understood English. My carefully-rehearsed pitch, despite me speaking as slowly and in as simple words as possible, was a disaster. I was met with blank faces. For the afternoon, I managed to hire an interpreter for the afternoon with the organizers’ help, but she got stuck in traffic, and when she finally reached the venue at 4:30 pm, I was already counting my losses.

And then something happened. A change of plan.

For our next session, I decided to go straight to the demo. And I started with how we were helping people delete their duplicate contacts. I showed the audience how 6degrees organizes their duplicate contacts into sets, like this:

…and from there, how they can simply tick them and merge/delete them, like this:

Choose the duplicates and merge/ delete them

It was a hit.

I could tell immediately that we’d got the audience’s attention. That we were solving a problem that mattered to them. I spent the next two hours answering enthusiastic questions (through the interpreter, of course) about what else 6degrees could do – our Live network of phonebooks, our Search feature, and our plans for an inbuilt yellow-pages feature.

That day was a reminder to me of the power of technology, and ultimately of how similar people are across the world, in many small ways – here I was, a complete stranger from another culture, on my first visit to one of the most enigmatic countries on the tech map, and I realized how the problems that we in the English-speaking world have, find an equal resonance among people from China. It was a good reminder, and I felt motivated.

How 6degrees treats your duplicates:

Duplicates are basically of two types – 1) Identical duplicates, where two contacts have the exact same number of fields, and the exact same values for each field, and 2) non-identical duplicates, where two contacts belong to the same friend of yours, but contain one or more different fields/ values. These are caused by several factors, the most common being several invasive apps on your own phone that add duplicates to your contact list. The 6degrees app has a “Delete Duplicates” feature at the bottom of your contacts list, like this:

The first time you click on that icon, the 6degrees app takes a few seconds to arrange your duplicates into sets for you to see. Identical duplicates are easy to deal with – 6degrees deletes all but one copy of each of those, so you are left with one copy of each identical set. The non-identical duplicates are then displayed in a clear form (see the first image above) for users to play with.