Because the people we know are at the center of most of what we do with mobile phones, the real operating system of phones should be built around those people, said Bob Iannucci, who stepped down as Nokia's CTO last month. He's now talking with venture capitalists and developers about building such a platform in an open way that transcends handset operating systems and carriers. Iannucci described his concept to scholars and industry professionals at the Stanford Computing Forum on Tuesday.

Iannucci envisions a web of names, pictures, video and information that would be linked like friends and related content in a social networking tool. As demonstrated at Stanford, this "social graph" was just a set of boxes linked by lines, which a user could navigate from one person or thing to another along logical connections. It would be a more natural way of organizing items than alphabetical lists of phone numbers and content, he said.