Temporary contacts

• US 9,807,214 B2
• Filed: 10/01/2015
• Issued: 10/31/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 10/01/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Agrawal, Abhishek
• Primary Examiner(s): MIZRAHI, DIANE D
• Application Number:
  US14/872,863
• Publication Number:
  US 20170099376A1
• Time in Patent Office: 761 Days
• Field of Search: None
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/01 Social networking
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 1/27457 Management thereof, e.g. manual editing of data
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/023 using mutual or relative location information between multiple location based services [LBS] targets or of distance thresholds
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 88/02 Terminal devices

Abstract

Architecture that enables the implementation of temporary contacts by the inclusion of additional data with each contact. The additional data can comprise geolocation data such as GPS coordinates, triangulation information, or other geographical coordinate or location data technologies. Additionally, the mere presence of the additional data can be a trigger to interact with the user as to if the contact should be maintained in the long term or removed in the short term. The association of the geolocation location data of a mobile device with a contact being added and intelligent use of the geolocation data enables prompting of the user to delete or mark for deletion the contact as a temporary contact or retain the contact until marked for removal and removed. Spatial and/or temporal criteria can be manually selected or automatically set for all designated temporary contacts or on an individual basis.

Claims

1. A system, comprising:

at least one processor; and

a memory storing computer-executable instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the system to perform a method, the method comprising;

receiving contact geographical location information related to a new contact of a contact list;

assigning the contact geographical location information to the new contact;

enabling tagging of the new contact as a temporary contact;

causing presentation of a notification based on one or more spatial criteria; and

receiving, based on the notification, an instruction to either delete the temporary contact from the contact list of a user device or preserve the temporary contact as a persisted contact in the contact list of the user device.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the spatial criteria comprises a distance of the user device from a geographical location of the temporary contact.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises automatically fetching contact information from social networking websites and contact applications in response to the new contact.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises storing the contact geographical location information and the temporary contact in the contact list.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises receiving, through a user interface, the new contact.

6. The system of claim 1, further comprising a global positioning system to capture the contact geographical location information of the new contact and device geographical location information of the user device.

7. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

identifying geographical location information of a new contact received at a user device;

storing the geographical location information in association with the new contact in a contact list of the user device;

identifying the new contact in the contact list as a temporary contact;

causing presentation of a notification based on the geographical location information of the temporary contact; and

receiving, based on the notification, an instruction to either delete the temporary contact from the contact list or preserve the temporary contact as a persisted contact in the contact list.

8. The method of claim 7, further comprising based on the received instruction to delete, removing the temporary contact from the contact list when the user device is a predetermined distance from a geographical location included in the geographical location information of the temporary contact.

9. The method of claim 7, further comprising based on the received instruction to delete, removing the contact from the contact list when the user device is a predetermined distance from a geographical location included in the geographical location information of the temporary contact for a predetermined amount of time.

10. The method of claim 7, further comprising automatically updating the geographical location information of the new contact.

11. The method of claim 7, further comprising filtering the contacts of the contact list based on the geographical location information.

12. The method of claim 7, further comprising updating the geographical location information of the new contact in a social network in response to user input.

13. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

detecting a new contact using a mobile communications device;

tagging the new contact as a temporary contact;

assigning contact geographical location information to the temporary contact that relates to a geographical location of the temporary contact;

identifying device geographical location information of the mobile communications device that relates to a geographical location of the mobile communications device;

based on at least one of a spatial or a temporal criteria associated with the device geographical location of the mobile communications device and on updated device geographical location information of the mobile communications device, causing presentation of a notification regarding one of;

deletion of the temporary contact;

or

preservation of the temporary contact as a persisted contact.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein:

the spatial criteria comprises a predetermined distance from the geographical location of the temporary contact;

the temporal criteria comprises a predetermined amount of time that the mobile communications device is a predetermined distance from the geographical location of the temporary contact; and

the method further comprises;

receiving, based on the notification, an instruction to delete the temporary contact; and

based on the instruction to delete, removing the temporary contact from a contact list of the mobile communications device when the mobile communications device is at least one of the predetermined distance from the geographical location of the temporary contact or is the predetermined distance from the geographical location of the temporary contact for the predetermined amount of time.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the predetermined distance from the geographical location comprises a geofence and the predetermined amount of time is user defined.

16. The method of claim 13, further comprising:

receiving, based on the notification, the instruction to preserve the temporary contact as the persisted contact in a contact list; and

preserving the temporary contact as the persisted contact.

17. The method of claim 13, further comprising automatically storing the new contact, the tagging as the temporary contact, and the assigned contact geographical location information in at least one of a contact list of the mobile communications device or a contact list on a network.

18. The method of claim 13, further comprising filtering a contact list of the mobile communications device for temporary contacts based on the updated device geographical location information prior to causing the presentation of the notification.

19. The method of claim 13, further comprising automatically fetching contact information from network-based sources in response to the detection of the new contact.

20. The method of claim 19 , further comprising:

in response to automatically fetching the contact information, automatically detecting the new contact is a duplicate contact to an existing contact; and

linking the new contact to the existing contact.