Trilibis Mobile’s Orbit App: A Phonebook and Social Networking Feed, All in One

I have to admit: after I saw the Motorola Cliq and its social-networking-widget-heavy MOTOBLUR interface for the first time, I was blown away by how useful it was, seeing all of your contacts and their updates in a single stream. Too bad, I thought, that no one but Cliq, and perhaps some future Motorola handset owners, can take advantage of it.

I had just hours earlier seen a demo of MOTOBLUR when I came across Orbit, an app for iPhone and BlackBerry (and, soon, Android) that lists all of your contacts in a phonebook, but alongside each name also lists Facebook and Twitter status updates. Just like MOTOBLUR, you can do everything from call to text someone (or contact them using a social networking platform) from a single and– yes– uncomplicated interface.

I love the idea of an app like this because as we all know, the iPhone doesn’t exactly excel at multi-tasking, although, yes, there is invariably an app for that (including Facebook and countless Twitter ones). What makes Orbit more intelligent than any other social neworking app, however, is the ability to group friends into orbits, or social circles. For each orbit, you can adjust the volume of updates. So, if you can only tolerate constant updates from close friend, Orbit is able to make that distinction.

Bonus: on the iPhone, at least, you adjust these settings using this intuitive (and addictive) onscreen dial. The onscreen colors chane (that is, they become more intense, moving from green to red) as you up the volume for a specific friend group. When you’re searching through friends, too, you can also jump to any letter in the alphabet, just as you can when you’re looking for, say, a song, on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Orbit will be available for free for iPhone and BlackBerry by the end of the year, and for Android in the first quarter of 2010. Check out more screens after the jump.