Dick Hardt, the CEO of Sxip, showed off the prototype of the application during a demo at Defrag 2008, a conference held this week that on making sense of the volumes of information that individuals, groups and organization are trying to digest today.

Sxip's so-called "address book 2.0" feature, which is being added to  3.0, marries data on a Web page and a user's e-mail, contact information, which can be spread across local address books and connections on sites such as and . (Watch a of 12 tips for safe social networking.)

Applications such as the address book feature Hardt was introducing are becoming known within social networking as flow applications. They are applications that bring multiple flows of information into a single view. (Watch a on 10 Firefox add-ons for better browsing.)

The address book software is activated as a user surfs the Web. For example, if the user visits a vendor site the Sxipper feature compiles a list of the user's contacts related to that company. The list is presented along the left side of the screen.

The user sees people they know at that company and people their contacts may know at that company. The data is gleaned from a user's address book and profile data from people they are linked to on social networking sites.