The Battle For Your Address Book
(An edited version of this first appeared as a guest post on VentureBeat.)
There’s a battle brewing for control of your mobile address book. Don’t be surprised. Tap Tap Revolution or Twitterberry may get the love, but the address book is the most valuable app on your phone.
Phone numbers are not like email addresses. Those are often sensible or have a display name attached, and the message itself may have a signature. Xobni has shown that you can build an address book on the fly in Outlook by mining the headers and content of your email. Phone numbers are almost random. Area codes are losing their meaning thanks to virtual numbers and number portability; no major mobile operator supports Caller Name Display; there is no (official) directory of cell phone numbers; and you can’t sign a phone call. Unless you have a gift for memorizing 10-digit numbers, you have to maintain your own little routing table.
It’s tedious enough to stop some people from switching carrier if they can’t take their address book with them. In the US, most phones do not have swappable SIM cards. Until recently, few allowed third-party apps to access the address book, and almost none support SyncML out of the box. (This is why popular European services like Zyb, Soocial, and Funambol are not well known in the US – they were all originally based on SyncML.) Some carriers offer wireless backup and restore, but only between their own phones. Some even block you from sharing contacts one a time over Bluetooth. To transfer your address book, you have to hack your phone with BitPim or buy a $40 gizmo like Backup-Pal or CellStik.
But there’s much more at stake than “churn.”
Unlike email, every call and text costs you money. The amount you pay often varies based on the number that you dial. Calls to your “Fave 5” are free, out-of-network calls cost more than in-network, international more than domestic and so on. (Readers in Europe who were feeling smug about their relatively open phones can stop now – their price plans are far more complicated and on average a call costs twice as much.)
When you look up a contact or type a name or ‘face-dial’, your address book – the application that maps names to numbers – could affect how much money your carrier makes from the call.
It could tell you that the customer you want to call is logged in to Skype, and that the friend you want to text is logged in to AIM. It could automatically route your international calls via Jajah or Rebtel. When you start typing a name that it doesn’t know, it could look up the number for you on the web.
Or … it could route your IMs over SMS, promote a particular photo-sharing site when you send a picture message, and charge you a buck for directory lookups, the same price you pay for 411 today. It all depends on which address book you choose.
Until recently, the choice was hypothetical. Consumers bought phones from carriers, not directly from the manufacturer, and so carriers had complete control over all the software on the handset, including the address book.
That’s still true up to a point – it explains why there are no VoIP-over-3G apps on the iPhone. But the rapid rise of smartphones has changed the rules. Carriers make money selling data plans, not selling their own apps. More apps sell more data plans. Giving up a little control of the platform leads to far more apps. And how many consumers are going to take the time and trouble to replace the native address book on their phone with a third party app?
Enter Facebook. Facebook knows who your friends are, knows their phone numbers, and already gives you multiple ways to communicate with them. The first version of Facebook for the iPhone looked much more like a phone address book than Facebook.com.
Or consider Google Voice: it replaces your old cell phone number, and third-party apps like GVMobile and VoiceCentral replace the address book and dialer on your phone with a mobile interface to Google Voice and Google Contacts. Google Voice is still in private beta but expected to launch soon.
Anything is now possible. Twitter was designed with mobile in mind, my Twitter URL is public and easier to remember than my phone number, but you can’t DM me unless I follow you. That sounds like a good model for phone calls too. Why not build an address book around Twitter?
In the opposite corner, there are carriers, handset manufacturers, and telco vendors who think that an ‘enhanced’ address book – one that draws in information from multiple social sites – will allow carriers to participate in the success of those sites without losing control over pricing.
Yahoo, iSkoot, and Intercasting (which was acquired by Good Technology last week) all offer multi-headed clients for social networks that keep them safely away from the address book. INQ baked a version of Facebook into its first phone.
Several major carriers are developing Plaxo-style “networked” address books, so that customers can share contacts without going outside the wall.
Asurion – which competes with FusionOne to power backup services for carriers – has built a next generation address book that pulls in status updates and information about all of your contacts. Zyb has been working on something similar since Vodafone acquired it last year, and Palm has built its own version for the Pre, dynamically merging data from multiple sources to present a unified address book. (The Pre debuts next week.)
Among those who appear neutral – or yet to pick a side – are big networks like Plaxo and LinkedIn, directory services like WhitePages.com, and startups like DialPlus and Skydeck.
This is not a battle between good and evil. Consumers hate complex pricing plans, but if you choose the right one you’ll end up paying less than you would in a world of flat-rate pricing. There are companies on both sides that have an unhealthy obsession with “controlling the customer”. Proprietary standards, subsidies, and tiered pricing (at least for data) will be with us for a long time. But in the next year we’ll see a lot of innovation around the core communication apps on our phones.
And the address book is ground zero.