Permissionless access to the Farcaster social graph to identify people you regularly public interact with (and who interact with you back) is the new contact sync.

Not a perfect replacement, but pretty good. 

Just need to scale it. :)

I think it's pretty hard for most people to understand right now why FC's social graph is so powerful, so lemme try to graph-pill you:

1) Blockchain has some amazing tools to help move from our current top-down-authority world to a bottom-up-builder world
2) Unfortunately, those same tools can (and are) used to scam people
3) As a result of 2) most true believers can't onboard their personal networks in good faith because they'll get rugged
4) A social graph creates a layer of trust which can mitigate 3)

As a small example, most DAOs fell apart last cycle because they were completely permissionless, and fell victim to non-value-aligned people coming in and extracting as much as they could.  A trust graph could allow you to vet a new member based on your existing members.

Now start to think about other places where you need trust: voting, hiring, travelling, etc.  A trust graph can be really useful in these cases.

Perfect example: 

When ordering from a restaurant on Google you now have all these wonderful options to choose from!

Yay, decentralization! 🎉

But... Which one should I use? 

If it was connected to an open social graph it could show you which ones people in your different trust networks use so you could quickly get high context information to make your decision.

Startup artist seeking inspiration.  Champion of /bcard