Broadband Advisor

So what happened here?

Pushing that button in your phone's contacts application opened a special "social address book" function that e-mailed an invitation to connect to the other people. When they accept, your contacts flow into their LinkedIn address book and theirs into yours.

In the future, when you get a new phone number, a notice goes out to all your contacts saying you have new info and would they like to accept it. Likewise, when other people's info changes, you get a notice followed by updated information.

This hypothetical mobile social address book system is better than the old business-cards-and-data-entry system because 1) it requires almost zero effort; 2) it autosyncs contact information to the applications you use to contact people, including on your phone, where it really counts; 3) data is always accurate and up to date; and 4) you maintain only your own information, not everybody's.

The same process happens on other business social networks like Plaxo and on personal social networks like Facebook and MySpace. All sync into the same personal, central contacts database, and conflicts are resolved by asking you which version to pick.

Beautiful, right? The scenario above barely scratches the surface of the myriad benefits of mobile social address books done right. The best part is that all the technology for this exists. Even the data exists. All that's required now is industry cooperation and leadership.

I've given you one scenario of how mobile social address books should work. Here's the list of criteria for what the system should let you do.

• Change your own contact info and have that information flow into other people's contacts databases, no matter which services they're using.

• Constantly synchronize social network contacts with any mobile phone or desktop contact software.

• When a contact calls, your phone displays a photo, social networking "status" info, as well as past meetings and any notes you've entered on that contact.

• Choose your own written form of communication: e-mail, social network message, IM, Twitter, Skype chat -- whatever. So, for example, you can choose e-mail, and I can choose Facebook messaging. You send an e-mail to me, and I get a Facebook message. I reply with a Facebook message, and you get an e-mail.

• Connect with calendar data so meetings with contacts are logged with the contact data. That way you'll be reminded in the future about your history with each contact.

• Kill any contact information. You should have the ability to decide you don't want to share your Skype contact anymore, so you should be able to blast it from everybody's address books.