Address Book

What Does Address Book Mean?

An address book is a database that stores names, addresses and other contact information for a computer user.

Advertisements

Address books allow easy access to the user’s friends, family, business associates and others by maintaining their email and other contact details on their computer. Address books can be software based, or accessed online or through a network. Users may also be able to export contacts from their address books to mobile phones, PDAs and other portable electronic devices.

Techopedia Explains Address Book

An address book may be part of a personal information manager, which combines an address book, calendar, task list and other features. To create an online address book, a user must create a profile page, which is cataloged by search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

Network address books can be managed through a singular interface in order to combine a user’s entire network. These can include contacts for social networks, emails, mobile phones and PDAs.

Some people believe that future network address books will have capabilities that supersede social networks when they expand to reveal the real-time activities of address book contacts, including current social network posts, blog posts and other electronic activities. For example, Facebook has friend suggestion applications, where users can suggest that their contacts become friends with other friends; this can be thought of as a type of shared address book.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Data Management Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…