ZYB In-Depth

ZYB in its current form is essentially a glorified contacts book, with a calendar and some social networking elements on top. The key to its uniqueness and success is the fact that via GPRS (and WAP, if you're so inclined) the service can automatically upload your entire contacts database for you, to do with what you wish.

You can use it as a backup service, or to fill up a new phone when you switch models, or to share your contacts with friends and co-workers. The sign-up process is pretty painless, even providing a visual phone selector if you can't quite remember if you have a Nokia 6151 or a 6150. The data is transferred, and voila, you're backed up.

From that point you can manage the contacts, adding new information (dates of birth, addresses and so on), while clarifying and de-cluttering them. Entering Eoin and then Eoin 2 seemed a smart idea at the time, but which Eoin is which, eh? It's probably easier to sort out with a keyboard than a phone.

The really interesting thing about ZYB, however, is not simply the fact that it's a good service for backing up your mobile phone contact data. It's the potential that the service has in the future, as a social networking hub.

At present you can share your calendar and contacts with friends, and vice versa. This is not new, and you can do it with various other utilities as well, but the draw of ZYB is that it has this ability to lift contacts directly from your phone. ZYB on its own or, more likely, combined with an existing social networking site like Bebo or MySpace, would make for a powerful social networking tool. And this is something that company content manager Runar Reistrup says they're perfectly open to doing,

"We are envisioning ZYB as the user's future hub for all personal contact information - not only phone numbers, street addresses and emails, but also Skype Names and other IM usernames," he told us in an interview. "We are expecting ZYB to become a kind of social networking hub, and we feel that we as such have an edge in the fact that the user uploads all his mobile's contacts to the phone when signing up for ZYB. The user's social database is already online on ZYB. This means that there is a great potential in ZYB for allowing the users to activate this information in one way or another.

"On the other hand, we are very focused on the integration between the mobile and the web and less on the social networking concepts, and in the meantime we are also building open APIs for our services that will allow other services to hook up to ZYB. So of course, if MySpace or any other big social networking site calls with some form of partnership in mind, we will be very open to their suggestions about how to integrate ZYB into their service."