" Here's what I'm talking about: an address book for my phone that remembers everyone I call, and everyone who calls me, and syncs with my email, which remembers every email I send and receive, and an IM client ditto -- and that uses Google-like heuristics to help me figure out who I want. And then uses P2P and various trust metrics to help me find people who are not in my immediate communication orbit.

I mean, how often do you search through your email to find the email address or phone number of someone you communicate with but just didn't happen to tell your address book explicitly to remember?

So now start imagining this "real" social network, as expressed by our communication tools and captured in our personal address book, starting to be overlaid with everything else we know about ourselves and our contacts -- their photo stream, their blog, etc. Imagine Nat Friedman's dashboard (I wish that were still progressing) in the sidebar of any communication app, reminding us of the latest to be known about anyone we're communicating with.

I could go on and on. Add in Seth Goldstein's attention recorder and ideas from mybloglog, a dash of Microsoft Wallop, and Gordon Bell's mylifebits." --Tim O'Reilly