More on the phone contacts as the basis of a social network

Coincidentally after my previous post – “Some initial thoughts on Ping“, Techcrunch have a great post titled “The Real Social Network: Your Mobile Contacts“, which echoes my thoughts that the address book contains the “real” social connections and could be used as the foundation for a new social network, what I thought Apple could do with Ping going forward.

They summarize it very well in the following paragraph:

But imagine if Apple built social tools right into your Contacts app? Maybe it would start with short status updates (maybe this would even pull in tweets), and then it would move to something like instant messaging. Then imagine if they did something with location? All of this would be opt-in, of course, but it could be very powerful.

In the comments of my original post Donald has mentioned that Windows mobile 7 already does pull the status into the contacts app of the phone.

I am looking forward to seeing where this could go in the future.