CloudContacts is a cloud-based address book (to learn more about the cloud, check out our Structure conference in June). Snap photos of business cards with the camera on your phone, email them to the app, and the information on the cards will be added to your CloudContacts database, which can then be exported to whatever address book or CRM system you use. I was impressed with the service when I reviewed it last year.

The new Twitter integration is built on top of CloudContacts’ Social Connector feature, which automatically tries to find the social networking accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) of your contacts from their email addresses (it presumably works in a similar way to services like MailBrowser and Rapportive). Once CloudContacts has found your contacts’ Twitter details, you can just click to follow contacts directly from your CloudContacts account, and also see which of your contacts you’re already following — because it uses @Anywhere, you won’t need to go to the Twitter web site.

Let us know what you think of CloudContacts below.

CloudContacts, a startup aiming to make the information stranded on business cards more accessible, added a new service to its offering this week.

While they may seem archaic, business cards are still the de facto way of sharing contact information. After attending a conference or event I usually have quite a few of them tucked away in my pockets. Extracting that information accurately into my contact manager after the event, however, is a real chore. CloudContacts already offers a pretty innovative service that involves mailing in those business cards you have cluttering up your desk. CloudContacts enters the data on the cards to its online contact management service, which then allows you to export the information to your email app, CRM system or contact manager.

The new service enables you to submit your cards via email. You simply take a snap of the business card with the camera on your phone, email it to the service (via a unique email address generated for your account, similar to the way that TwitPic works) and the information on the card is extracted added to your CloudContacts contact manager.

I tried the system out with a couple of cards and it worked well. Getting a decent snap of one of the cards with my iPhone’s camera proved pretty difficult as it had a small font and a low-contrast combination of black text on a blue background. I managed to get an OK picture but thought that it might cause some problems for CloudContacts as the text was very hard to read in the photo. Not so — CloudContacts captured all of the information from the card perfectly, which was impressive.

A contact's details page

A third card, one of those tiny MOO mini-cards that are popular with folks working on the web, proved impossible to photograph properly with my iPhone’s camera; the text was simply too small.

The CloudContacts contact management app is straightforward, though it has a couple of nice frills including automatically pulling in a Google Map and Twitter widget (if a Twitter username is present) into your contacts’ details pages. It makes it easy to export your contact data into a number of different file formats for import to your favorite email app or contacts manager.

Pricing starts at $4.95 per month for up to 20 cards. For large quantities of cards, it would be less hassle to use the CloudContacts mail-in service; CloudContacts view email subscription as a good way to “top up” your card contacts, rather than a way to input lots of cards.

CloudContacts pitches this service as more accurate and less hassle than business card scanning hardware. Having never used a business card scanner, I can’t attest to that, but with business card scanners costing upwards of $150, the pricing is reasonable.

How do you get business card data into your contacts manager?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

In the intervening period, we’ve seen companies such as Plaxo and Facebook seek to evolve themselves into the position of defacto social address books, but even such powerful companies have only offered uneven ‘hacks’ for integration with our email, cellphone and IM contact books.

Apple’s Mobile Me service has attempted to provide some of the ‘glue’ to connect these silos of contact data, but at a great price…and of course tied to the Mac universe. It’s also telling that Gmail still lacks a useful API to it’s Contacts data – perhaps data that should really be a standalone application? This has left an opening for companies such as Soocial…

Founded in Amsterdam, by Stefan Fountain, Soocial provide hooks into existing services and a modicum of interoperability between them. Currently the service enables users to draw contact data from…

• Gmail
• Highrise
• Facebook
• OSX’s Address Book
• A number of mobile handsets

It’s an impressive (though again uneven) list of contact sources, notably support for what appears to be a broad range of handsets,though, some like the Facebook application don’t offer true synchronization or access to contact data within that service.

I can’t help but thinking what’s really needed is a master web-based address book, with a standards-based API that any device or application can draw contact information and synchronise with. Perhaps this is the space that Soocial hopes to occupy – or indeed upcoming services such as CloudContacts.

Soocial’s Fountain has such faith in the utility of his service, that he has generously extended a limited number of invitations to Web Worker Daily’s readership, as part of Soocial’s (currently private) beta trial.

Head on over to http://www.soocial.com/web-worker-daily to pickup your invitation and put Soocial through its paces.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Evolution of the E-book Market
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast