• Wired, Wednesday, October 17, 2007 10:46 AM

Wired says that the Web 2.0 iteration of the popular address book will be one of the main topics of conversation at this week's Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Address Book 2.0 refers to technology that knows where you are and what you're doing on the Web. Think of it as a gigantic mashup of your email inbox with every social network you belong to. It would be privacy-approved because it's information you've offered; this would just be an aggregation of all the information, and link that information to all the Web-enabled devices you carry. It's an advertiser's dream, allowing the company who controls it to finally deliver on the promise of behavioral targeting.

Imagine if wherever you are, your friends and contacts would know how communicate with you through the best available means: email, cell phone, IM, SMS, etc. The Web 2.0 Address Book would enable this simply by clicking on a contact's name.

The promise of the Web 2.0 Address Book is large, to say the least, but it's yet to be invented. It's what Google, Facebook, et. al. are after. Web 2.0 guru John Battelle, the conference chair, calls the personal information "social capital." The pivotal question for the future is who owns the date: the user or the Web service.

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