Social Network on Your Mobile Phone
23. August 2007 – 20:36 by
Oh well, this is a blog post which will probably make me look stupid. Nevertheless it is also a blog post about a fairly new social network. A couple of months ago I was looking for a web service to back up the address book of my mobile phone. My choice was Danish company Zyb which was launched just a few months before and provided a basic but easy to manage service to back up and sync the address book, the calendar, and all my text messages (SMS) of my mobile phone. Backing up all data went fairly well. However I didn’t use it very often - well, actually just twice if I remember correctly - and forgot about it. That’s really stupid considering that some sensitive data of close friends, family, and many more people is stored on a server somewhere and stupid me doesn’t remember. That should not happen again. Apologies to those whose data I didn’t care much about.
Though fortunately I have read about Zyb on TechCrunch again. Admittedly I had to look for my login credentials which were not easy to find (remember to use a password manager regularly, folks) but eventually I have managed to login in again. Well, it works on IE but not on Firefox for me. Every time I try Firefox I get an error message; that problem should be solved, I think.
Anyway, besides backing up your mobile phone’s data Zyb has introduced some social network features by now. Users can build a profile, upload pictures, and add status messages (Twitter, you know) which can also be sent from mobile phones and can be subscribed to, of course. Though the real beauty is that you can connect to other Zyb users - preferably to the contacts of your address book - and get their updated contact information right to your mobile phone. A really comfortable way to keep your phone up-to-date. If your web calendar supports iCal (Google Calendar, 30 Boxes,…) you can import calendars as well. Nice.
Though not everyone wants to make their contacts, pictures, and shouts publicly available. So it’s good to see privacy regulations. Users decide who can see their contacts, their pictures, and shouts.
I like Zyb a lot already although none of my contacts are on Zyb yet. That’s the reason why the profile looks rather empty; I have to change that. It makes a lot of sense to build a social network on top of mobile phone contacts, I think. Most people have their mobile phone around almost 24/7 anyway.
Oh yeah, this is not the kind of portable social network I and other people blog about. 
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