'Social' phones to reveal all about your caller

Forget caller ID. A coming wave of "social" mobile phones is likely to tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the person calling you. An application called Robo.to, available in the fourth quarter on the iPhone and handsets that run Google's Android operating system, offers a stream of information about callers, including personal videos, photos and their current location. It is an example of the "social address book" - the reinvention of a core handset feature that carriers will leverage to earn fresh revenues and win back consumer attention lost to iPhone applications and media companies' services. With Robo.to, when the phone rings, a user can see a video recorded by the caller as a "status update" that shows their mood and where they are. The screen can also feature their latest Twitter messages, their name and title from the Linkedin professional network, recent photos posted to the Flickr photo service and a map of their location.