"It is still the case that no matter what device you give to someone who's never had a cell phone, it's easy for them to think about making calls and it's dramatically harder for them to use most of the other functionality in your device," Iannucci said. That includes the handsets made by his former employer, such as the Nokia N95 smartphone.

"They're amazing in terms of their abilities, but they're very hard to use," Iannucci said.

With this social graph, users could become familiar with it on one phone and then be able to find their way around their next phone no matter which hardware or software vendors designed it, he said. It would be possible to design a version for text-only phones, lacking the graphical representation but still logically organized the same way, he said.