When I lived in NYC, I frequented hack && tell, a hackers’ meetup where folks showed off side projects and generally were nerds with one another. During that time, I was trying to better understand how to show up for my friends and community. I came up with what some might call a technical solution to a social problem, but, after 15 years of reflection, I’d say it’s a bit closer to a cognitive prosthetic: FRM, the CRM for Friends.

The initial idea of FRM was a terrifying privacy situation where it would proactively monitor your contacts and recommend things for you to talk with them about. 15 years of behavioral surveillance from social media the ad networks has done a lot to put into perspective how bad that panopticon is for society.

The current implementation is calmer and friendlier. It asks you simply who are the people you care about (managed by CardDAV e.g. Apple Contacts), how often you’d like to talk with them, and then provides a way for you to log that you met with them.

As folks begin to work more with personal agents (like: openclaw), the harness to hook into this sort of prompting is available. We now have a natural loop which can tell the owner “Hey… you should reach out to this former colleague you haven’t talked to in a few months.”

I think a self-owned and simple contact tool is exactly what’s needed. It’s got a simple command line interface and stores most of its data in your CardDAV server (Apple Contacts, Fastmail, etc). The only thing excluded is the ‘contact log’, which is a single jsonl file on disk, which I have sitting in my Dropbox for easy backups. The use of it looks something like this:

If you want to try it out for yourself, check out the newly open sourced repo on GitHub.

Thanks to apgwoz for the long-incubating ideation so many years ago.