tag = "Address Book"

Mobile operators and device manufacturers have poured billions of dollars into upgrading networks, trialing new services, adding more pixels to camera phones, and launching slick advertising campaigns. At the same time, they’ve paid very little attention to making the phonebook – perhaps the mobile phone’s most critical and ubiquitous feature – easier to use. That’s too bad because aside from making life easier for their subscribers and increasing the phonebook’s usability and usefulness, operator revenues would increase via enriched social connections that are easily accessible in the phonebook.

That’s just what the social address book is beginning to do.

The concept of a connected address book really takes hold in the mobile space when it’s a pain to navigate the web to look someone up. Yahoo has their oneConnect client for the iPhone. LinkedIn and Plaxo also have mobile interfaces.

So who is going to build the most compelling mobile address book? What are the most important elements?

Yahoo! is preparing to launch a social-networking application for smart-phone users called oneConnect, following successful previews in the US.

The application will allow users to integrate all their contacts from their Yahoo! Address Book and selected social networks onto their smartphone.

They will then be able to send instant or SMS messages, post their status, and view the latest activity from social networks. An initial version is due to be released in the US on Friday (September 26) and a UK version is due to follow early next year.

The initial version will support Bebo, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.

Here's how it should work

Shake hands. Each of you pulls out a cell phone. "What's your LinkedIn profile?" Open your phone's contact application, and press a single button. Choose LinkedIn from the drop-down menu, and type in the other person's profile specifier (in my case, it's "elgan" -- five quick digits). Press "Send." Done!

In bigger meetings, it becomes standard to add the appropriate social address book links with the invitation. The contact exchange happens before the meeting even starts, and that ridiculous contact exchange ritual is banished from the boardroom forever.

So what happened here?

So who is going to build the most compelling mobile address book? What are the most important elements?

* When someone updates their profile, push updates out to each address book.
* Lookup service to find contacts not in your address book
* Import and Export of contacts.
* Avatar or Photo support as a visual memory.
* Fields for profiles on other social networking sites (MyBlogLog, Twitter, Brightkite, Last.FM, etc).
* Lifestreaming to browse your contact’s latest updates. Nice to know before you call them, gives you context.

It is frustrating when a lost phone leads to a loss of all contacts — after all, this shouldn’t be a problem with today’s technology. Xumii changes this by announcing a first for cell phones — a social address book. It makes quite the impression, and is another example of how important mobile technology is becoming.

I always love social networking and chatting services aggregators because it is a real pain to manage all my social activity from different places. Xumii seems (I did not test it yet) to bring this concept to the next level: it integrates the IM services and the social networking sites, making everything accessible from one screen on your mobile! Users can access every contact from every network in a mobile address book that combines contacts from social networks, instant messaging services, media sharing Web sites. Xumii enables mobile chatting and media sharing with other Xumii users. You can join the Xumii beta or go to m.xumii.com on your mobile phone.