The Financial Times recently flagged an intriguing idea from Robo.to, the Web site that lets people post three second videos from a webcam or a camera phone on to a Web site – a kind of video version of Twitter. Robo.to is apparently planning to launch an iPhone and an Android app in the next few months that will replace the regular caller ID with the caller’s latest personal video, photograph and location, according to the newspaper. The screen could also show the caller’s most recent text updates from Twitter or another social network.

The idea is essentially an extension of the “dynamic contacts” concept, in which the address book in the user’s handset is automatically updated with status updates from social networks. But does a multimedia caller ID make any sense? It is difficult for me to imagine watching the caller’s status video while my handset is ringing – I am normally fumbling around, just hitting the ‘answer’ button in time before the call goes through to voicemail. Moreover, I can imagine surreal scenarios in which a photograph of the caller’s dog or garden appears on my screen.

If you need to know something fast, text usually works better than a photograph or a video. In other words, a multimedia caller ID might actually be inferior to today’s text ID. Still, I would like to see the caller’s location pop up along with their name and, perhaps, some kind of indication of their mood. Then you might not have to go through those ‘I’m on the train’ and ‘how was your day’ conversations.

But whom am I to argue with Justin Timberlake – an investor in Particle Inc., the San Francisco company behind Robo.to? We might all be using multimedia caller IDs in future…