Current telephony is socially handicapped, as it does not automatically facilitate connecting with unknown others, regardless of their likely relevance to our present situation. This talk looks at rectifying this situation through the application concept of "auto-buddies." Technical obstacles, including digital identity, location, social network representation, and reputation will be examined.

Mankind has spent in excess of a hundred years focused on building a global communications infrastructure to connect devices. With this infrastructure now in place, the emphasis should shift from the network layer to the abstractually higher "social layer" to connect people and groups of people with ever-increasing intelligence. This newly emerging layer has a number of incomplete or missing pieces and the struggle to realize "auto-buddies" highlights these.

Much of this talk will focus on the technical problems facing auto-buddying: location (geospatial and civic as well as problems of resolution); digital identity (the lack of); open and standardized presence formats; personal profiling methods; means of social network representation; means to express desires, wants, and needs (via ontology's); reputation and trust metric mechanisms. Possible technological solutions to these problems will be presented in the form of GEOPRIV; ENUM/OASIS Liberty Alliance specifications; PIDF/RPID; Jabber's Pubsub; the semantic web (RDF/OWL/FOAF); as well as microformats such as XFN.