This week we’ve passed a truly magical number! Since launching our service our ZYB users have uploaded and stored more than 10 million contacts through the service. To be exact today’s number is 10.683.118 – that’s approximately the same number of people living in Seoul, the world’s largest city! We are of course thrilled to see that people all over the world appreciate our backup services and hope you all continue to store and connect to your friends on ZYB.

So what’s the buzz turning everyone’s mobile contacts more and more popular? At ZYB we believe users like you realize that the people who matter the most to you are not the ones on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or any other online universe. The ones who matter the most are the ones you meet out there in real life - and those real friends are the ones you store and guard on your mobile phone.

In order to put action behind our belief, ZYB is launching a brand new “Real Friends” ZYB Facebook application. The app allows your profile visitors to add their contact details to your mobile phone’s address book turning your Facebook friends into real friends – friends who you can call or text message from your phone.

Remember that you can store pictures from your phone on ZYB. Once a picture is stored, you can share and tag it with the people who are in the picture, using your phone’s address book. People who are tagged in a picture will be notified about it and will probably go to your ZYB profile to see the picture.

That’s all for now, but we will soon be adding more cool stuff and we hope you’ll continue to find ZYB as exiting as we do!

Tim O’Reilly had a great post on Radar last week. The topic is about not being able to use Jaiku on his iPhone but it’s followed by a statement that any zybber believes in. It’s one of the reasons why we started ZYB: “I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven “social networking application” represents my real social network.” This is also supported by Om Malik from GigaOm back in August writing about Facebook Fatigue: “Tip: The best way to ensure the fidelity of your social network is by taking a look at the names and numbers in your mobile phone’s address book. It kind of tells you who matters the most to you!”

Both Tim and Om gets it. The people you that matters the most to you are not the ones on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo or any other online universe. They are offline and you meet them out there in real life. Those relations have been recorded in mobile phone’s address book for a decade. ZYB stores these relations, take them online, and adds value to them by letting users do some basic activities with their existing network. All these activities are linked to the offline world by people and by the unique link ZYB has back to the phone.

A social network is not something you create - it’s something you have. You have it on your phone - and soon on ZYB.