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I agree with you that status and location are very hyped right now and this is the main focus of the phonebook 2.0 type of apps. The main use cases of linking contacts with Facebook is currently the retrieval of friend’s picture, status and location.

Retrieving the phone numbers is indeed really interesting. The public API do not allow this functionality yet but the social networking APIs are quickly evolving. I believe this is just a matter of time. It should be soon allowed as long as the third party respects the terms and conditions and privacy.

I don’t really buy the “stickiness” angle though and would be interested in your thoughts.

I can only see the mobile address book having a significant impact on churn if it is difficult to move your address book from one operator to another. But I really can’t see large-scale adoption of such a service unless it is easy to get your data out of the operator’s service in a reasonably standard format.

It could increase “stickiness” with a general free online service portal; but personally I can’t see any network operators winning in this game. The more established internet services companies like Google, YaHoo, MS, and random start-ups will always beat them at this game IMO — just like they have in every single other internet service so far.

Am I missing something?

I’ve seen mainly the possibility of getting the contacts from your email account. Although thats a good place to retrieve you contact’s e-mail or even IM alias, I believe (based on my experience) facebook and skype would be the best places to retrieve mobile numbers, and I haven’t seen an application that can do that (maybe due to data retrieval restrictions). Is there any?

Status and location updates are very hyped now, and they seem to be integrated in a few applications (phonebook 2.0 and not phonebook ones), but still I think the phone number is the biggest catch.

Thanks for your feedback.
I think that the mobile network operators have the systems in place now because they have the opportunity to change the mobile address book (with Android for instance).
T-Mobile US has proven with MyFaves that an operator could deploy a successful end-to-end service (mobile and Web) with a mobile-centric approach. The service is accessible from the Home Screen.
To be successful the social address book needs to start from the mobile address book or from the Home screen.
This was really hard to achieve a few years ago.

Your second question which refers to the business case is also interesting. I believe that nothing has changed in this area. It is still hard to get the consumers to pay for this kind of service.
Why should they pay while Gmail, Facebook and Twitter are free? Even LinkedIn is free! This service is about increasing stickiness and improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
It improves their brands which is very important for mobile operators. A nice side effect is also the increase of data and voice traffic.

I think that legal concerns have to be handled with great care. If you see the terms and conditions of Facebook, (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Storable_Information ) it clearly states that data coming from Facebook have to be stored for a maximum duration of 24 hours. This is required to ensure privacy.
For instance, if a user writes a status and regrets it the following day, he must be able to delete it and leave no trace. When it is deleted, the other linked users on Facebook no longer have access to the content of this status. This has to work both on Facebook and all the other applications getting the data from it like a Social Address Book service.
This is why I believe that Social Address book services have to be based on a type of server to server synchronization. The data retrieved from a social network must be synchronized and not just fetched and replicated to ensure that what has been deleted and not available anymore on the social network is also deleted from the service using it.

What do you think of the legal problems often associated with with fetching / replicating social network data?

Thanks for the overview has been a time since I took a detailed look at the Address Book sector.

Going back in time we had Wildfire from Orange which was killed off despite being loved by the users. What makes you think that today the Mobile Networks have the systems in place to make a new social network based address book work?

Looking at the early days of what is now ShoZu, the founders of Cognima saw the use of replication rather than synchronization as the way forward when it came to keeping data on the handset up to date on all machines. The Company never quite managed to launch the service or get the consumer to pay. What has changed now?

Finally in the fixed world the likes of services such as Plaxo don’t seem to have been able to get most of the users to pay for the service. Thus when such a service moves to mobile will it be paid for by the networks and or handset vendors as something that helps with retention?