Android Gets Social Mixing With Asurion Mobile Addressbook
Social networking is huge, no doubt about that. Palm ratcheted up the ability to network socially with Synergy, by pulling various networks together into a seamless heap of contacts for Pre owners. Motorola recognized this usefulness and carried it a step further with its new MotoBLUR technology. Both Synergy and MotoBLUR bring the phone owner’s Facebook, MySpace, email, Twitter and other networks together into one big social networking pot. The user can follow all their peeps in one place, all with push notifications to make sure nothing vital is missed.
A new program has launched today that attempts to bring the same capability to the Android platform. The Asurion Mobile Addressbook carries the social mix further by combining all of the popular networks with IM and bringing it right into the address book on the Android phone. It uses filtering so the user can prevent information overload. And it’s built on an open framework so developers can add their own systems into the Mobile Addressbook, allowing for additional capability.
The program is free and there’s a long presentation about Mobile Addressbook that can be viewed to get a feel for everything the app can do. Note to Asurion — put up a video demo of the program in action, not a boring presentation.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
I sent myself a link, this isn’t in the market yet, when will it be available?
It’s available, I applied it to my G1 this morning.
What did you search for in the market?
I found it, the link they send txt is not the correct link, here it is: http://mixin.getaddressbook.com
I and the AddressBook team would like to thank everyone for trying and giving feedback on AddressBook. Or at a minimum, trying to find it!
It’s only been a few days but we’ve learned a lot and will be responding to feedback with improvements in short order. One issue that we’ve seen in this blog is “where in the heck/he__ is the AddressBook app?”. We made a mistake and were not as explicit as we should have been that only Android 1.6 is supported by AddressBook at this time.
We realize this is a disappointment to HTC Hero (guess who LUVs her Hero, me) and Moto Cliq users. However, try as we might, there was a severe bug introduced with Android 1.5 that added significant instability into our app, especially with installation and deletion of mixins. We worked with Google, submitted a fix for Andorid on 1.5, and while Google was able to respond for 1.6, there was not an opportunity for them to get the fix into an update for 1.5.
If any of you out there are willing to join our “guinea” program (very pre-release), and likewise are willing to follow a strict set of guideline for installing/de-installing with “as is” ground rules, please email us at addressbook.support@asuion.com to discuss use on 1.5. If not, we’re working day and night to be ready for 2.0 and still taking stock of what we might do for 1.5.
Keep the feedback coming, we are listening,
-Nancy