Abstract: To ensure that contacts (and other information) are presented to the user of a communications terminal in a manner that approximates the perceived relative importance a human user might assign, there is described a method for ranking contacts relative to one another on the basis of a ranking value that has been generated from timeline activities (such as tweets, blog posts, RSS feed, emails/SMS etc.), and/or status information (presence, location etc. of the contact) and/or trends in such activities/status values. This ranking method may be supplemental to more conventional rankings such as alphabetic ordering of contacts or ordering by edit date.