Context and social distance aware fast live people cards are described. A user context and/or a relevant person context may be determined in response to detecting a user interest in viewing contact information. The user context may include user's attributes such as organizational position, preferences, location, working hours, which application the user is employing, etc. Relevant person context may include context information (similar to the user's) for people within a predefined social distance such as the user's peers, supervisor(s), close friends, etc. Information associated with one or more persons of interest to the user may then be selected and retrieved from a cache storage at a server a productivity service to be provided to a client application for display to the user. Information to be stored in server cache for rapid retrieval may also be selected based on user and relevant person context using observed user behavior.