Unified contact list

Methods, systems, and computer program products for maintaining current contact and metadata information for one or more contacts. A mobile phone stores contact information for multiple forms of mobile phone communication with the contacts. Each contact is identified as either an automatic live contact to be synchronized as new information becomes available or as another contact that will not be synchronized as new information becomes available. The mobile phone communicates the contacts to a data service provider for backup storage and update processing. From automatic contact and metadata information updates initiated by and received from the data service provider the mobile phone periodically updates automatic live contacts. Based on the synchronized contact and metadata information, the mobile phone initiates communication with one of the contacts. Example communication includes voice, email, instant messaging, short message service, multimedia message service, locate, and peer to peer application (such as gaming) communication.