It is ironical that the emergence of telephony will bring about its own demise, for good. In its traditional sense, telephony is understood as a means of linking two people's voices. In the present day, the trend in telephony is moving towards multi-modal streams received on hybrid, multi-purpose, hand-held devices. That said, it is still a laggard compared to the evolution of the Web and the latter's success in bringing people together. Social networking via telephony is infant.

Online social networking, in its present state, is crippled for two shortcomings -- the problem of identity and of dynamic attribute recognition. To amplify, first, you can't be sure the person you're buddying with online is really the person they say they are. Second, their interests, or attributes, are static. In real life, a person's interest change on a day-to-day basis. This evening, you're interested in finding out about a recent pop album; by the night, you want to team-up with folks who've watched and liked the film you're watching. There's currently no mechanism to syndicate attributes dynamically and auto-buddy a bunch of folks with common interests at that given point in time.

The Web only connects us to people we do know. How do we aim about creating a system that dynamically looks up people, may be, within a certain radius of our geographical location and shows them up, not just on a browser restricted client, but on any of our hand-held devices? Lee S. Dryburgh outlines an opportunity space for collaboration and social networking through telephony.