More on Contacts
Posted on September 13, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |
I have continued to have a good experience with Plaxo, in fact I up’ed to the premium subscription for $50 a year just to get the “de-duping” utility.
Microsoft Entourage and Apple’s Address Book sync’ed and apparently thought it would be a good idea to duplicate every contact in my address book, and when I threw in my desktop iMac, well I had 3 of every contact. The prospect of culling through almost 10,000 contacts to eliminate 2/3 of them was downright depressing.
Plaxo has this neat de-duping utility that made quick work of the job, and as a bonus, found 324 contacts that could be merged to be more complete. It worked perfectly and because the toolbar app syncs to the online service I was able to synchronize my address book across two computers and two separate applications.
My Apple Address Book (for those of you that don’t speak Mac, you really want to use the provided PIM applications like iCal and Address Book because they integrate so well with Cocoa apps) and Microsoft Entourage also sync and that means my address book is always in sync (including my new iPhone) and I have a copy online as well as a backup copy courtesy of Plaxo.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am about this because for years I have been plagued with mismatched contact data on the various computers I used and my mobile devices. Really, it’s been in my top 5 problems for at least the last 10 years and now it’s solved. A great example of how doing something simple really well and doing it for, in this case, less than the cost of 1 grande latte a month, can make a big fan out of a customer.
So I went over to Gmail and decided to export the contact list that has been building up there for a while… I was really surprised to see that my Gmail contacts now number over 2,100 and judging from how many times I search gmail for a contact I am quite positive a lot of them are not in my address book. I’ve felt for a long time that contacts in Gmail is a seriously killer app, it’s surprising that Google hasn’t delivered even a basic contacts management service. I’m not the only person interested in this…
BTW, here’s a great script for running a search on your Gmail contacts from the Mac Address Book.
Tags: Plaxo, Microsoft Entourage
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About
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. These are my thoughts on technology, innovation, management, public policy and pretty much anything else that I find interesting.
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