With the rise of cloud services, users' personal data (from photos to bank transactions) are scattered and hosted by a variety of application service providers. Communication services like email and social networking, by virtue of helping users share, have the unique opportunity to gather all data shared in one place. As users shift their communication medium from email to social networks, personal data are increasingly locked up in a global, proprietary social web.

We see the rise of the mobile phone as an opportunity to re-establish an open standard, as social data are often produced, shared, and consumed on the mobile devices directly. We propose an API where apps can interact with friends' phones directly, without intermediation through a centralized communication service. Furthermore, this information can then be made available on our own devices to personalize and improve online interactions. Based on this API, we have created a working prototype called Musubi (short for Mobile, Social, and UBIquitous) along with various social applications, all of which are available on the Android market.