The phenomenal growth of social networking sites is proof enough that people tend to want to stay connected, both with people they know and with those they may not know. In this always-on world, the coupling of VoIP, social network services, and privacy is a key business driver for VoIP application providers.

Telephone networks have been social networks from the start but as the needs of social networks become more sophisticated, so do the demands on the structure of the telephone infrastructure. Ndiata Kalonji's presentation focuses solely on the voice aspects of telephony and envisions a future role for the telephone at the heart of an increasingly sophisticated and always-on social network. He discusses the new network features that will provide social telephony and how users can enjoy new services which exploit the capabilities of technologies such as IMS and Web 2.0 platforms.

Finally, Kalonji describes the changes necessary to bring about the integration of our social, business, and family lives within a new network of connections and virtual numbers. This comes down to making the four crucial elements of the telephone infrastructure - the media server, call server, customer database, and application server - open. He likens this change to moving from a closed fist model (where the fist is the node or one number connecting to the network) to an open hand model with a small community around it.