AddressBook Connects Contacts To Social Networks

Android: If you dig the idea of Motorola’s socially integrated interface but aren’t planning on rushing out to get a new phone, Asurion’s AddressBook can match up contacts with their service profiles, letting you quickly contact someone across multiple channels.

As a stand-alone contact manager and dialer, AddressBook looks a bit slicker than Android’s built-in handler, with a swipe-right-to-call feature that saves you at least a little finger-pecking. The real features, though, lie in the plug-ins you can download for the major social networks—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and even Amazon Wish Lists, as of this writing. Install those plug-ins from the Market and allow them to auto-connect your contacts, and you’ll be able to quickly write a Facebook message, a Twitter DM, or leave a comment on a friend’s latest Flickr or YouTube content.

The auto-matching isn’t perfect, however, especially if you’ve got the messy, double-entry Google Contacts list that seems to be the default. Luckily, you can manually undo and re-match contacts to networks, though a long-scrolling approval list would be a nice pre-matching option. The other killer option in AddressBook is business listings, which allows you to add a business you frequent or work with, and have that listing offer quick directions, business hours, and other information from YellowPages.com.

AddressBook is a novel attempt at a better contact manager for Android, and worth checking out if you’re as frequent on Facebook or Twitter as you are on SMS. It’s a free download for Android phones only.

Asurion Mobile AddressBook [Asurion via The Download Blog]