Central lists, decentralised contacts

I've done a little more thinking about the contact list idea. Instead of providing a centralised list of contacts, what if each Contact in a Contact List was a URL to a webpage containing an hCard?

Essentially it's the same as storing the Contact data locally but this would decouple the requirement for the owner to use the central application to update the information; instead they would update the info using whatever publishing software they used to make the hCard in the first case.

[edit - the central system would then periodically poll the page to check for updated hCard data]

Of course if a person doesn't have an hCard published somewhere already, the central system could provide a basic hCard hosting service which could then be used within a list. This process could be made transparent for someone who wanted to manage many contacts themselves within the central system; ie if the List Manager wanted to make a new contact himself and include it in his Contact List the system would create a URL with the hCard and use this rather than some internal format (a database row ID for eg).

Hmn... :)