Brewster, a Mobile App, Wants to Transform Your Address Book
On average, how many contacts do you have in your phone? How about on Facebook? On Twitter? — Steve Greenwood, an entrepreneur in New York, is willing to bet that the average person is juggling at least a thousand contacts and could use a little help.
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Greenwood's Brewster launches into a contact landscape he sizes at a thousand-plus connections per person, scattered across the phone's native address book, Facebook, and Twitter — three lists that don't talk to each other. The bet is that merging and organizing them is a product in itself, not a feature.
The timing carries a warning the launch-day coverage doesn't spell out: just days earlier, on July 9, 2012, Twitter cut off tweet syndication to LinkedIn, showing how quickly platforms revoke third-party access to their social graphs. An app whose core value depends on Facebook and Twitter APIs is building on ground those companies control.
First-order effects
- Users who adopt Brewster get a single deduplicated contact list spanning phone, Facebook, and Twitter, replacing manual cross-referencing across three separate apps.
- Brewster itself becomes dependent on Facebook's and Twitter's goodwill for the data access its entire product rests on — access Twitter demonstrated it will withdraw when a partner competes too closely, as LinkedIn learned this week.
Second-order effects
- If contact aggregation shows real demand, Facebook and Twitter face a choice between treating third-party graph brokers as distribution or as leeches, with revocation as the enforcement lever.
- Other startups eyeing the same 'living address book' opportunity must now compete for the identical API permissions, turning platform access — not features — into the scarce resource in the category.
Third-order effects
- The address book is shifting from a static file on the device to a cloud-synced service, which makes whoever holds the merged social graph a gatekeeper over a person's most sensitive relationship data.
- That consolidation points toward eventual friction over data portability and privacy rules, since no current framework clearly governs who owns a contact list assembled from multiple networks.
The trend: Consumer apps are racing to fuse fragmented social identities into a single living address book, with each entrant's fate hinging on the API policies of the platforms whose graphs they aggregate.