what do we do with pre-internet address lists and social networks? (Entered: 2007/10/12 11:44:52)

Everyone,
Since all (most) social networking (business or personal) sites work by linking/finding people we know by looking up unique e-mail addresses, what do we do to find people that we don't have an e-mail for, but maybe an old phone #, old town, name, some location or background info etc. is there any service or system that helps us find and connect to these past contacts/freinds/colleagues? I just did an outlook address book lookup on Xing, and it did a name lookup of Xing members on my non-e-mail-matching contacts and gave me a list of possibilities, but since I'm in the USA and xing is mainly europe (or for other reasons) Xing does not have many of my contacts, however I'm sure the LinkedIn, MySpace^?, and Facebook would have many people I know.

Can anyone help me with this problem? Also I have some technical ideas of a way to search and find people in an automated way on the open internet, but don't have the time to implement. If anyone is interested, or if anyone knows where I could find the data definition specs of an outlook *.pst file that would be great.

Thanks,
--Ben Burnett

Ben Burnett
R&D Software Engineer: wired, wireless, ad hoc, mesh networking,
network monitoring and data visualization
ATC (Architecture Technology Corporation) http://www.atcorp.com/
bburnett@atcorp.com (952) 829-5864 x167
--------Views expressed are mine and not those of ATC--------
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-- BenBurnett - 12 Oct 2007