Increasingly, I find a lot of my friends who are using Facebook as the place where they keep their contact info up to date. One solution would be for Facebook to open up and let other services tap into that data store to keep their address books up to date. That’s geek-cool, but I’m not sure how many people would want to use it.

What’s cooler, and potentially more powerful, would be to have a Facebook address book application that works on my phone. What I really want to be able to do is “click to call” any of my Facebook friends right from my Blackberry. Instead of having to keep track of their contact information in a separate app, I’d like an app that ties my Facebook friends and their contact info together in a seamless way.

This shouldn’t be that hard to implement. A user could have a simple configuration option where all click-to-call requests from “friends” would be routed to a number of their choosing (cell, mobile, voip, etc).

I think this would be a great way for Facebook to continue to extend their presence on mobile phones and reinforce the value of keeping your contact info up-to-date on Facebook.

So what is it about FriendFeed that I like more than Plaxo. Well, I’ll be brief. First, I’ve been using Plaxo for a long time as a way to easily backup and access my contact information across multiple computers. As a result, I have a lot of people in my Plaxo address book. In theory, that would be a great place to start in determining where I want to share stuff. Only problem is that there are many people in my Plaxo address book who aren’t “friends” in the sense that I want to notify them of my every waking web activity. Second, many of the people with whom I’d like to share my web activities aren’t in my address book – I have their contact info on Facebook only or buried in Gmail. I don’t have it in a structured form that’s easy to access.

There are other things I really like about FriendFeed. With Plaxo Pulse I have to “friend up” my pulse network and make decisions about which people I’d like to allow access to which types of data. In addition, I have to classify my contacts by the nature of our relationship. I initially found the privacy controls on Plaxo to be useful, but now they’re becoming a bit tedious to manage. FriendFeed makes this process a lot easier. All I had to do was add the services that I like and add the Facebook application and friends of mine started to automagically appear in my friends list. It’s not entirely clear to me how FriendFeed is doing this, but a) it’s bringing in the right set of people thus far and b) doesn’t require me to actively spam my friends to get them on the service.

Overall, I think FriendFeed is just a more frictionless way to keep up with what your friends are doing across the web than Plaxo Pulse is at this point. The overall impression that I have after using FriendFeed for awhile is that it is a very clean, focused, and simple product – it does one thing really well and makes it really easy for you to enjoy the product as a user. Pulse feels a bit clunkier at this point – it’s part of a larger set of things that Plaxo is doing and the need to integrate with some of their other cool features puts an overhead on the product that makes it feel a little less slick.

I’m also sick of being a host for parasitic viral applications. I appreciate the fact that FriendFeed doesn’t ask me to pound my friends with invites or relationship requests to get value immediately. Thanks for saving my social capital and curing me of invite fatigue.

Also a hat tip to the FriendFeed team for the recommended friends feature that points out people I’m likely to want to follow given who my friends are already following.

The only other time I’ve had the same reaction to a service like FriendFeed was the first time I used Twitter. It was really simple, clean, entertaining, and immediately useful. I’m not saying FriendFeed will grow as quickly as Twitter but my reaction to the overall product ethos is the same that I had when I first discovered Twitter.

The one thing that I’m really waiting for is for someone to do the obvious – take all of the things that my friends and I are collecting, reading, and or sharing and surface it to me. Show me the “personalized Digg” that so many of these services seem to be groping toward providing. Soon I hope the net effect of all of this sharing will be a better filter for what to read, view, and consume on the web.

Overall, I do agree that email inboxes do contain a lot of interesting data about people and how frequently they communicate over email and potentially IM if a vendor offers both products in an integrated fashion. That being said, I don’t see how any of the top web email providers (Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google) can use this email information to build new social networking products. There is, however, an opportunity to use that data to power other people’s applications.

What additional value would I get in using one of these systems over Facebook, MySpace, or my current social network of choice? Details on these products are sketchy at best. However, almost any social networking product worth its salt has a contact importer. Once a user imports his/her contacts, he or she can then determine who from that subset of people he/she would like to invite. Is having a machine prompt to do this for personal social networking of great value? I can see the utility of this auto-population or auto-discovery in a work context (Xobni does do a good job of showing me my own correspondence patterns and I can imagine many things you could build on top of that data – the work use case is different as I think work communication patterns tend to be more dynamic than personal ones). Nothing I’ve heard in the limited details that have come out gives me reason to think that they’re on to something bigger.

I’d also say that if “powering up” this network requires me to create a new profile page, it’s a non-started. I’m out of that business for now unless or until I see a really great application that’s worth the time.

Webmail inboxes are a mess – I have yet to use an email product that has an even decent address book. All of the email address book offerings from the Big 3 email providers feel really dated. For example, the Gmail address book does not do a very good job of de-duplicating contacts. I have folks in my address book who have multiple entries and I’m not interested in going through to manually de-duplicate them; I’m counting on a machine to do that for me.

The larger point here is that I don’t know how you can build a really good, effective social networking product on top of email if you don’t do something to put some good, quality structure around the data. Social networking services who are sucking up email addresses to match a user’s inbox with their database of contacts don’t have the same problem – you just throw away the ones that don’t match (or allow a user to invite them). It’s a very different situation if you want to build a whole new social network product with email as the foundation.

Cross-functional collaboration is not easy inside of large companies – This is a fairly obvious point, but big companies are notorious for having internal challenges when it comes to cross-product collaboration. When one of the products in question is email, I don’t imagine that will be an easy conversation – nobody wants to play around with an interface that touches tens or hundreds of millions worldwide.

Think about the refresh cycles for webmail systems. How often do Gmail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmal get updated? Not that often, and I have to think that touching those interfaces requires a lot of signoff and a strong conviction that the proposed changes will positively impact a wide number of people. Otherwise, you might end up with angry users. I have a hard time seeing any of these companies acting aggressively with one of their web crown jewels.

The end game ought to be to make this information available to other services and make mail the data platform, not build new applications. Sadly, I don’t think that’s a very interesting business to be in – I don’t know how you re-establish yourself as a major player in social networking by simply providing the data layer that powers other applications.

At the end of the day, developers care about increasing the audience for their applications and/or making more money. At the end of the day, end-users (also known as normal people) care about a great user experience and a compelling services.

With these goals in mind, here are a few thoughts about the open social movement:
1. OpenSocial is a set of APIs, not an actual product – Despite all of the speculation about what it will be, I think the press releases are pretty clear about what it won’t be. What’s being contemplated is a set of APIs that will make integration social data easier and allow developers to pull from a wider variety of sources. It’s not actually a product or service in and of itself. The onus will still be on the community to build cool stuff that makes use of the platform. And the underlying data has to actually be useful – this alliance has to have profile data about people and entities that are actually interesting to developers.

2. Open systems tend to work best when competing against truly closed products. There are a lot of posts on the web that keep citing the “fall” of AOL and the triumph over the web. Two quick things I think bear mentioning. If being valued at $20 billion recently is a “fall” then I bet a lot of companies would be happy to fall. AOL is no longer the force it used to be, but it hasn’t exactly disappeared. A better example is the case of open source software in the enterprise. In the case of OSS, the vendors were so intent on maintaining control that there was a real market opportunity for more open entrants. Facebook is not completely open, but it’s certainly more open than MySpace. It will be interesting to see if an extremely open system can beat an open system.

3. Having open APIs does not remove the need to build really great products. Openness is a product decision. Being more open than your competitors does not guarantee success. It doesn’t guarantee adoption. I do think, though, that it gives you more flexibility to be clever about how you integrate with others. Simply opening up does not remove the requirement to build products that take advantage of that openness to build better products and services.

One of the undertones in a lot of the blog posts I’ve read is that new upstarts on the Facebook platform haven’t been able to break through to dislodge RockYou or Slide. Naturally, finding a new pasture in which to compete where you can be one of the first-mover launch applications is appealing. But at the end of the day, this open coalition has to deliver on its promises to developers (openness = more opportunity to acquire users or make money) and end-users (openness = better user experiences and more compelling applications) or it won’t work.

I think it will be really interesting to see how this all pans out. We’re clearly in the early days of this.

So what’s next? Well, I think what’s next (and by far most interesting) is some concept of the “strength” of a connection. Specifically, today I can see a lot of my friends’ social networks, but I have no idea for the relative strength of connections. Sure, if I see Person A knows Person B, I can always make an offline inquiry to see if that connection is strong or weak. But very soon I think we are going to have tools like Xobni that profile communications patterns and surface that information both to end users and to other applications. And it won’t be just social networking and community applications that benefit. Enterprise applications (collaboration tools, CRM tools, HR/recruiting systems, etc) will all benefit from having access to some of this information. We’ll call this contextual “strength” Phase III.

Phase III is really interesting to me because I think it has to be a largely machine-driven approach. Communication patterns are too dynamic for any user to bother continually updating “strength” of connections. Also, as Xobni has shown me, if you are a power emailer you’re likely to be surprised by who shows up as ranking highly. There’s no reason the same can’t be done for IM. I’m not sure that I’m going to turn my phone logs over to some 3rd party analytics company, but IM and email would be a pretty decent picture of what I do and with whom I communicate. Passive profiling of communications patterns is going to be really interesting and I think will expose really interesting information about the nature of communications. I think Xobni is on to something really cool and big as it’s delivering value to me today (even though I have to use it in Outlook) and I can see a path to a lot more value in the future.
As an aside, I think this is the best shot that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have to wedge their way back into social networking relevance. They already own the message stream and have the data they need to get a sense for who knows whom. It will be interesting to see whether they choose to open this information up and let other applications take advantage of it or whether they use it for the bedrock of their own auto-generated social networks.

Below are three things I would love to see someone develop. I know that not all of these things can be accomplished using the Yahoo! Mail API today:

Email-oriented personal organizer – I’d imagine that someone who pays the extra money to get Yahoo! Mail Plus is a serious email user and probably relies on email in a real way. Right now, a lot of my life happens on email — a lot of my to-dos, social events, and meetings start off as email exchanges. The hardest thing today is finding a good way to take all of that information and context and import it into some other personal organizer system. I would love to see an enterprising developer take the Yahoo! Mail functionality and move to a model where I can start with an email string and convert it into a real task, event, or something else. I realize that you can do some of these things in Outlook today (drag an email on to your calendar or task list to create an event or task, for example), but I’d like to be able to see this work in a web context without a reliance on an Exchange server. I am sure that some enterprising person who deals with a lot of email could come up with a clever app that helps email addicts stay organized.
Email Stats Dashboard – This isn’t particularly useful, but I would be willing to give someone access to my message streams in order to get some visibility into the underlying patterns of my communications. With whom do I communicate the most? To whom do I reply most quickly? Whose messages do I always read and what messages do I generally ignore? This information has limited value on a standalone basis, but could become a very powerful feeder for a next gen personal organization service. If the system could get good at profiling me and my message stream, I might actually trust such a system to start doing things on my behalf of sending me reminders (you haven’t talked to Noah in a few weeks so you should email him, you have an important email from Jack and you haven’t responded for 4 days, etc). Having access to this communication pattern data could be useful to me as a user, especially if it becomes the foundation for more interesting apps based on how I triage my own email flow.
The ultimate address book – Plaxo is just about the only company that seems to have a real interest in address books. How can that persist? I use Plaxo and find it useful, but there are a lot of things that Plaxo does not do for me. One of the most basic things that I would like is a smart bounce manager. First, the smart bounce manager would give me a report on all the mail that I send that bounces and flag those contacts as being out-of-date. Second, because almost every contact info update email I get has the same structure, this program ought to also be able to recognize those kinds of messages and silently update my email address book. Third, it would be great if this ultimate address book would do automatic de-duplication for me. I have tons of friends who have personal and professional email addresses and end up showing up as two different entries. There has to be a better way. There are lots of other gripes I have with the modern address book, but suffice it to say that there’s plenty of work to do.