A preferred contact group centric interface for a communication device can be used to facilitate communications by a user. The user interface can be arranged to activate from a user's “home page” on the display, from an idle screen that is accessed after a timeout period expires, or any other appropriate mechanism that activates the preferred contact group centric experience. A user selects the preferred contact group from among an array of the user's contacts. Once the contact group is configured, a minimal number of navigation/selection features is necessary to activate any number of communication modes available to the contacts. The contact group is configured such that simple and quick navigation between the contact members is achieved. The contact group can be presented in 2D and 3D arrangements, in any number of list or geometric configurations. A pricing plan can optionally be tied to each member of the contact group.

Preferred contact group centric interface

Display screen with animated graphical user interface

Portion of a display screen with a user interface

Systems, methods and computer program products for providing information associated with an attachment (e.g., attachment received through an instant message system, online collaboration tool, electronic message and the like). A sidebar may allow a user to view comprehensive profile and content information associated with the attachment using an attachment information viewer. The sidebar also may allow the user to switch between a message attachment information view (e.g., to facilitate browsing of the document or attachment) and a person profile information view (e.g., to facilitate browsing of personal or public data).

Presentation of Organized Personal and Public Data Using Communication Mediums

System, methods and computer program products for creating and maintaining an address book are described. The address book may collect or update its existing contact information from sent or received communications. Contact information associated with the existing contacts also may be collected (or updated based on information received) from outside sources (e.g., external to an application hosting or accessing the address book). The address book may intelligently combine profile data from various sources to enrich the existing records associated with the contacts.

Self populating address book

An intelligent contact management technique that automatically manages contacts on a communication device such as a mobile phone is described. The intelligent management technique can automatically determine and display a user's favorite contacts on a display of a mobile device. The technique can also intelligently group contacts based on their contact frequency. It can provide a contact-oriented event notification that notifies a user when a contact event has occurred. The contact-oriented event notification can be associated with a visual representation of an associated contact.

Intelligent contact management

Described is a technology that uses the unused (free) space (that is not occupied by text of a text message) to encode metadata into the text message. The metadata may correspond to an advertisement, a sender's mood, a sender's location, and the like. The inclusion of an advertisement can help reduce the user's cost, while the inclusion of other types of data can reduce the number of messages that need to be sent, without requiring typing in the information. The receiving device processes the metadata to determine an action to take, such as to display an advertisement identified in the metadata, along with the text. The advertisement content may have been previously downloaded in anticipation of its later display.

Yandong Wen

Papers

Intelligent contact management

Utilizing extra text message space