Scrubly provides similar “de-duping” functionality to the Personal Assistant tool provided by unified online address book service Plaxo that I wrote about earlier this year, but it’s considerably cheaper and provides a few features the Plaxo tool doesn’t:

• Address books are automatically backed up before cleaning them, so original files can be retrieved and restored at any time (reassuring if you’re concerned the de-duplication process may accidentally remove some entries you don’t intend it to).
• It can automatically update Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail address books after cleaning them up (Plaxo can also do this, but only if you pay for its Premium Sync service)
• Scrubly groups compatible duplicate contacts together, merging them into one complete entry.

It’s easy to use: Just sign up, then either authorize the Scrubly app to connect to your Gmail/Google Apps accounts and/or download the clients for Outlook or Apple Mail. You can set up multiple address books in your Scrubly account; each one is scrubbed and backed up separately. When you hit the “scrub” button on an address book, Scrubly scans it, looking for duplicates, junk entries (those that contain very limited information, such as only a name) and “loose match” duplicates (entries that Scrubly thinks are probably duplicates but they aren’t exact matches; you need to review these individually). Once you’re happy with the results, you can re-import the scrubbed address book (or books) back into your email app (or apps).

If you have fewer than 250 contacts to clean up, Scrubly is free. More than that, and you can either opt for a one-time cleaning of address books with an unlimited number of contacts for $9.95 or buy an annual subscription, which costs $24.95. It worked pretty well in my testing, successfully de-duping both Gmail and Outlook address books. However, note that Scrubly only has de-duping tools; it doesn’t attempt to automatically keep your address books up-to-date like Plaxo’s Personal Assistant does, and it can’t connect with the variety of services Plaxo can, either. If you have a mass of contacts spread across various different email and social media accounts, and want to de-duplicate entries across all of them, Plaxo’s pricier service (which costs $79.95 per year) may be more useful. But if you’re simply looking for a way to clean duplicates from a particularly messy address book, Scrubly offers a simple and cost-effective solution, particularly as you can opt to pay for a one-time cleaning.

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Getting Your Inbox In Order

Etacts offers a dashboard that points out what emails you’ve recently received but haven’t replied to, singling out any emails that seem more important based on the frequency of your conversations with a particular email address. It even bumped an email from my mom up to the “important” category. You can also set reminders, either through the dashboard or through a bookmarklet set up for Gmail.

You’ll also find that the tool pulls in older emails and uses them to rank your contacts for you. Based on those ranks, you can see how recently you met someone, who you’ve lost touch with recently and even any reminders you’ve set on their email addresses. Etacts offers the option of manually adding phone calls, too, and can factor that information into its rankings.

Sending Your Emails

If you’re interested in streamlining your email even further, Etacts offers tools for sending emails without switching back to Gmail. You can create message templates, send multiple emails at once — not the same emails to different people, but multiple emails in one screen — and track who has responded to your emails.

If you’ve gone to some effort to create groups within your Gmail contacts, don’t worry. Those will be imported into Etacts as well. You can also create new groups within the web application. Once you’ve got groups in place, you can set reminders on when to contact those groups.

From Gmail to Etacts

In order for Etacts to have the information about your email it needs, you’ll need to give it permission to access your Gmail account. That access is protected, of course: while you can choose to log in using your Gmail address and your password, the default is that you can grant authorized access to your Google account via oAuth. That fact makes life a lot easier if you decide that you want to limit the site’s access to your account down the road — you don’t have to change your password. Unfortunately, that access seems to be one of the key reasons why Etacts hasn’t expanded to other email providers. Gmail is simply easier for the web application to work with. Etacts only downloads email headers to figure out who your most important contacts are — it doesn’t download entire messages.

Etacts is free. Note: When you first grant Etacts access to your email account, be prepared to let the web application do its thing for a while. Especially if you’re a heavy email user, it can take a while to import your emails and analyze them.

Let us know what you think of Etacts in the comments.

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An interesting new feature is  the“person:” URL, which you can use to look up people in your contacts list — or anybody on the web, for that matter. Firefox will combine information from your the address book on your computer with that found on the web to create a profile page about the person — for example, you could try “person:http://facebook.com/simonmackie/”

The update also adds support for auto-completion of contact names in the Awesome Bar. Just start typing a name and it will suggest possible matches, as the screenshot below shows:

Although Contacts is still classed as “experimental” by Mozilla, it’s an incredibly useful free add-on that I highly recommend installing, particularly if details of your contacts are currently spread across a few different services. You can download it here.

What do you use to manage your contacts?

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Among them is support for importing contacts LinkedIn  and Plaxo, per-service data display (so you can see where the information about each contact has come from) and per-service refresh (if you update your Twitter contacts, for example, you can quickly update Contacts, too — auto-refresh is planned for a later release).

Additionally, a “person search” facility has been added to Contacts that can scour the web looking for publicly accessible information (such as email addresses, web site URLs, Flickr account, etc.) about your contacts. This feature is similar to Rapportive and MailBrowser, both useful Gmail plug-ins that I’ve written about previously, although with Contacts you have to press a “Search” button to initiate the search — it doesn’t happen automatically. As with Rapportive and MailBrowser, the effectiveness of this search is mixed — some contacts have plenty of publicly available information tied to their email addresses, some none at all. Here’s what Contacts found about me, for example:

Users with Contacts installed should have already been updated to the new version. If you haven’t tried it, it’s definitely worth downloading — if you spend most of your day working in various different web apps, having a universal contact manager available via your browser makes a lot of sense. It’s free, although you should note that as it’s still an experimental add-on there are no guarantees that it’s completely free of bugs.

Have you tried Contacts? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Simply put, Contacts (installed as a Firefox add-on) makes your browser “aware” of contact lists and address books you’re using elsewhere on the web, but rather than simply providing a view of these aggregated contacts, the add-on integrates them into form elements, so that names and addresses are auto-completed as you type.

Installing Contacts requires a browser restart, after which this add-on is available from Firefox’s Tools menu. Firstly, you need to link your contacts to Firefox:

Currently, Contacts enables you to synchronize with Mac OS X’s address book, Gmail contacts and Twitter. An additional feature scans through imported contacts, adding Gravatar avatars for each entry where available. Notably, creating these hooks to other services is a simple one-click process; presumably because authentication details already reside in Firefox’s cookies.

I’d actually forgotten I’d installed Contacts a few days ago, until today I was signing up for MixCloud — a web radio service. As I was completing the signup form, Firefox handily auto-completed my email address alongside a thumbnail of my avatar!

Contacts works well and includes APIs to extend the importing and permissions features, though auto-completion is currently limited to email addresses only.

Despite growing competition from Opera, Safari and Chrome — and perhaps even IE9 — Contacts underlines Mozilla’s commitment to utility, openness and innovation; the add-on certainly feels like something others will emulate and adopt as standard browser behavior.

Have you tried Contacts? How is it working for you so far?

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A great conference leaves you feeling empowered, inspired and ready to take on whatever comes your way. And then you arrive home feeling overwhelmed as you unpack, do laundry, open snail mail and handle all the mundane stuff that needs doing. Not only that, but also you have so much information that you hardly know where to begin to put it to use.

Profit from a Conference in Five Easy Steps

Recovered? Rested? Don’t proceed until you are. For a day or two, focus on recovering and getting through the mundane stuff. You have notes, business cards, programs and handouts to help you remember what you need to know. Then start making your conference pay off with these five steps.

1. Review your content. This includes notes, business cards, handouts, people to follow up with and anything else that came back with you. Don’t use this time to read it all. Instead, sort the content into three piles:
   • Now: The information most important to you, and items with deadlines.
   • Next: The things to look after you finish working through the “Now” pile.
   • Never: Useless stuff you received and items with the least value. Be ruthless: Toss them in the trash. Let them go, otherwise you risk doing nothing with any of the things you brought home. Tip: Next time you go to a conference, do a review to toss the bad stuff before you leave, as it will leave less to pack and less to contend with when you get home.
2. Act on the quick “Now” items. Read the notes, enter business cards into your address book, drop a quick note to contacts, link up with contacts in social networks and make a list of action items that will take more time.
3. Schedule “Now” items that take more time. If you want to, say, write an article based in information received or study notes in depth, put them on your tasks list with due dates to ensure they get done.
4. Check for information posted online. You may skip this if you have all you need. Sometimes you find a gap in the information you have or wish you had notes from a session you couldn’t attend. Find out if the sessions were recorded or the speaker’s slides have been posted online, and see if the conference had a Twitter hashtag or web site where everyone shared notes.
5. Complete your tasks. Make sure to follow up on the items scheduled in step 3.

Go Deeper With Your Conference Knowledge

Everyone absorbs and uses information differently. Here are things you can do to make the most of your conference content. Just watch out that you don’t get overwhelmed;  it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to contact too many people, select too much to study or write too many articles.

• Follow up with people. Did you make any promises to contacts you made at the event? Do those first before pursuing the rest of your “Now” items. Only move onto the “Next” group after you have comfortably followed up and stayed in touch with the higher-priority contacts.
• Study the materials. Since you sorted out the more important content, study it. How you study depends on your learning style. Looking over it one time isn’t enough for most people to remember and apply the concept. As you learn the material, you’ll find opportunities to put it to work. After you feel you got what you needed from the material,  move on to the “Next” pile.
• Write blog posts or articles. For some, one of the best ways to learn the material and let it sink in is by writing an article or blog. Make a list of article ideas and then prioritize them. Write articles on the most important topics. Put away remaining ideas for safekeeping.

Next time you prepare for another conference or trade show, check out Judi’s “A Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker.”

How do you make the most of a conference after returning home?

Photo by stock.xchng user Vicky 5.

The other new feature involves categorizing your contacts into groups. Yes, it’s really just another way of creating distribution lists which comes in handy when corresponding with large groups of people at once. You can add your contacts to more than one group and send emails to the group.

Also new is the ability to mark your favorite contacts with a star, which makes them appear on the front page of your address book. All of your top contacts from Gmail automatically get the gold star but you can easily unselect it.

Plaxo has also renamed its social streaming “Pulse” service to “Stream.” All of the same functionality remains, it’s just a new name.

These changes point to a good future for one of the elder statesmen of the Web 2.0 era. Plaxo has listened to its users, improved performance and added some useful features. It’s still the best when it comes to importing contacts from other address books such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. By the way, you might have missed this feature but you can also import all of your LinkedIn contacts. Just perform a LinkedIn address book export and upload it to Plaxo here.

It’s going to be interesting to see what other socially-aware address book services like Gist and Soocial will do in this space. I think it’s surprising to see that Google still hasn’t done much with Gmail’s address book; I want contact information synchronization and other social networking features to get added, but nothing much has changed. Not yet anyway.

Do you use Plaxo? What do you think of the new address book?

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Photo by PhotoXpress user Andrey Zyk

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The other new feature that most people might have missed in a previous update (I know I did) is the ability to access each contact’s Twitter account information. This was also a very popular request from Xobni’s userbase who’ve previously been able to access their contacts’ Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Adding Twitter and SalesForce connectivity to your address book makes a great deal of sense.

Here’s an example of what the Xobni panel displays next to your email message. Not only will you see the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses and threaded email conversations, but now you can actually view that contact’s Twitter stream (once you connect the right Twitter account, based on the email address used). Notice how you can actually send a tweet right from Xobni as well as unfollow the contact and view their Twitter profile for even more information.

Personally, I love this hot trend of infusing intelligence into our otherwise under-utilized address books. Services such as Xobni, Gist and the one that started it all, Plaxo, are providing tremendous value by allowing us to get more from our contacts. It’s baffling to me that Google has not done much with contacts in Gmail. Things will become even more interesting when (not if) Google finally adds social networking power to its address book.

Do you use Xobni?

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You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book.

Another consideration is having a secondary resource for backing up your primary address book. With most services able to import and export files as a CSV or vCard file, it has turned into a fairly easy process. For the least tedious approach, try to find a secondary resource that you can keep in sync with your primary resource — for example, Plaxo can sync your address book with Mac OS X, Yahoo!, Google and several other apps. Otherwise, you’ll have to import and export your contacts on a regular basis.

After selecting the apps for your primary and secondary sources, here are the steps to take to make sure that you have all your contacts in primary resource and backing it up to the secondary resource.

1. Determine what kind of files your address books can import and export.
2. Export address books from your social networks into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file based on Step 1. Remember where you save the files.
3. Import the addresses books from Step 2 into your primary resource. Repeat until you’ve put all of your contacts into your primary address resource.
4. Sync your primary and secondary resources. If they don’t have a sync wizard, go to Step 5. If they have a sync wizard, make sure you synchronize them on a scheduled basis if it’s not automated. You’re done.
5. Export the address book from your primary resource into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file.
6. Import the primary resource file into your secondary address book as your backup. Repeat on a scheduled basis, unless you find a way to automate it.

You might want to consider a solution that can sync with your phone — if that’s not already your primary source. That’s what I like about Google Contacts and Calendar — they sync with my favorite PC app, I can access them anywhere and they also sync with my phone. Read our contact management and application articles for ideas and apps to consider.

How do you manage all of your contacts?

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I really appreciate well-produced synchronization, because I’ve experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get right. It seems that software developers can never quite agree on how to organize contact information, so everyone’s databases are different. For a long time, for instance, one of the major makers of financial management software didn’t even create city, state and ZIP/postal code fields, opting instead for an address field where all of that information was run together, making the data very difficult to parse.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Snow Leopard’s “sync with Google” function, especially because I have a fairly large address book, and most of its entries have photos associated with them, something that very few sync solutions even try to support.

With a little planning, you can easily sync your address book with Google. Here are some tips — some of which are also applicable to other synchronization systems, such as the one available for synchronizing data between Google and Thunderbird’s Address Book on a PC.

1. Clean up your contacts. It’s easy to get sloppy about how we enter information, so it’s worth looking through your Address Book to make sure that your data is accurate and well-formatted. Putting first names and middle initials together in the first name field can produce amusing results, as can forgetting to check the “company” box for such entries — I had one card titled “Daily, Web Worker”! I also discovered a bunch of messed-up entries that had apparently been caused by previous experiments with sync software and services. One such service must have been European, because I found lots of entries where the postal code preceded the city, as is standard in France, but which isn’t correct in North America or the UK. Be careful with international phone numbers, too. If you don’t precede country codes with the plus (+) sign, some programs will try to format the numbers in North American format.
2. Back up your data! At the least, use Address Book’s Export function, and save a backup in Address Book Archive format. If you want added safety, use a program like Address Book to CSV Exporter to save your data in CSV format, which can be read by lots of other programs.
3. If possible, don’t try to sync two sources with different data, at least for an initial synchronization. You’ll get best results if you can clean up your data in the Mac Address Book, and completely erase all your contacts in Google. However, if that’s not possible, the charmingly named Conflict Resolver will spring into action during the sync, and give you the choice of which records to keep.

Once you’re ready, enter your account information into Address Book’s Preferences. Go to Accounts, check the “Synchronize with Google” option, click “Configure,” and enter your Gmail or Google Apps email address and password. That’s really all there is to it. I’ve found that you need to be logged out of the Google web interface for the sync to start. You might also need to make a change to your Mac Address Book in order for the sync program to become active, but once it begins, the process is surprisingly fast.

The Mac-to-Google sync system does have limitations. It can sync with one Gmail or Google Apps account at a time, and although it offers sync with Yahoo Mail’s contact lists, I’ve never been able to get Yahoo sync to work. Sync is also available with Apple’s MobileMe service, but I haven’t tried that.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with the results, and am happy that I can have immediate access to my contact information in several different places. As far as I’m concerned, one can never have too many backups of this vital data.

How do you keep your contact data synchronized?

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By its very nature, Gist compiles a sometimes overwhelming amount of information about your contacts so I was a bit skeptical about it being possible to reduce it down for the mobile interface. Gist combats this by really focusing on your most important people: those who you are meeting with next.

The Initial views on the app work on the assumption that you are either on your way to your meeting or taking a few minutes prior to prepare. Gist displays the meeting attendees and provides quick links to zip off an update email or pull up a map. It also provides easy access to the dossiers of your meeting attendees so you can grab some quick info prior to your event.

Beyond that, you do have the same views to your data as on the web app, your dashboard, events, people and companies — all distilled into consumable pieces that fit into the time that you have.

The Gist iPhone app is being released for no charge as part of the open beta program and is available through the Apple iTunes App Store. UPDATE: According to Robert Pease, VP Marketing, Gist, the App will now be launched next week.

How will mobile access to your Gist data help you keep in tune with your contacts?

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For Gmail users with an iPhone who work from home, this is great news. Often, those of us not plugged in to the corporate world miss out on the little niceties like Exchange information syncing. Google Sync, now that it includes Gmail, offers a great free alternative for those of us who’ve left our office working days behind. And it uses Microsoft Exchange technology to do it.

Now you can manage your contacts, calendar and email all from your smartphone, and have that information synced back to the cloud in real time, so that wherever you access it, you’ll be looking at the same thing. I’ve been using MobileMe to do that for about a year now, but since many people already use Gmail, and since Google’s alternative is free, this is much more useful for most people.

If you’d like to set up your iPhone or iPod Touch to work with Google Sync, check out the instructions posted by the official Google Mobile team. Some may prefer to continue using Gmail on IMAP with their device, since it means you can set the schedule by which you’re notified of new mail, instead of having incoming messages dictate to you. Also, keep in mind that the iPhone supports only one Exchange account at a time, so if you have one already for work, you won’t be able to take advantage of Google Sync.

Are you using Google Sync?

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For a while, I’d sync Outlook and Palm Desktop, and then Outlook would update the BlackBerry (I didn’t actually use Outlook at all, it just acted as the middleman). It worked great. But then my dependence on Google Calendar  grew, because I could access it from any computer as well as my BlackBerry, and it wouldn’t work with my sync setup.

I investigated many tools and synchronization applications to find a perfect sync solution. I didn’t want to use lots of different applications to syncing needs.

The almost perfect solution was to find a dedicated synchronization app. Mine comes from CompanionLink. This method cuts out Outlook for good. CompanionLink now has a Google edition available that synchronizes all of Palm Desktop’s features with Google, too. For updating my BlackBerry, I use Google Sync for Mobile. It’s still not perfect, but it works and I can access and update my information in Google or Palm, while my BlackBerry just has access to the information.

If you’re struggling to find the perfect syncing app, here are some options (some free and some paid):

• Chapura: PocketMirror has been around for a long time, and syncs Palms with Outlook. Its Echo and PocketMirror work with Palm Pre.
• CompanionLink: Syncs Google, Palm Pre, ACT!, LotusNotes, Outlook and many others.
• Google Sync: free Google syncing applications for Mac, Linux, Android and others.
• gSyncit: Syncs Outlook and Gmail.
• Mark/Space: Sync apps for Macs.
• Sync’Em: Connects Macs with Exchange and Outlook.

How do you keep your data in sync?

Photo credit: djwudi

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If you made the most of your time at the conference, you made a lot of new contacts and expanded on old ones. When you get home, it is time to start carrying those relationships into the future. And when an event is fresh in your mind is also when you need to evaluate your experience to decide what worked and what didn’t about it.

There are four main follow-up tasks to complete after a conference to ensure that the benefits of the conference continue long after the event is done.

Keep your promises. The first thing to do when you get home from an event is to keep any promises that you made while you were there. Did you promise to email someone, send someone something, or put information up on your web site? Get that done as soon as possible. Thanks to your phone or a laptop and on-the-go wireless, you may even be able to get some of these tasks done before you get home. Keeping your promises, and in a timely manner, will mark you as reliable and trustworthy, and the contact will bring you to forefront of people’s minds again.

The biggest challenge in keeping promises may be in remembering what promises you made during the chaos of an event. A good tactic is to have a dedicated place to record promises as soon as you make them. It can be a page in your Moleskine, or a notes file on your phone, but the important thing is that you should automatically make a note whenever you make a promise.

Follow up with contacts. This activity can take many forms depending on the interaction you had and your work. It can mean sending emails to say how much you enjoyed a conversation, or calling someone to discuss potential business. You might want to follow people on places like Twitter and Facebook to keep in contact with them regularly. The key is to make contact and extend the relationship past the event itself.

Enter contacts in your manager. It’s all too easy to put off the tedious task of entering business cards in your contact manager, especially if you don’t have a card scanner. But it’s best to do it before you forget who the people in that stack are. Use the notes field to help you remember key points from your contact that might be useful in doing business (or just reminding you who the person is) later. Use the date field to record when the information you entered was current. It only takes a moment to enter that date but the rare times you need it, you will be glad you did.

Review the event. Lastly, you need to report to yourself about the event. While it is fresh in your mind, consider what worked well and what didn’t. Think about what you’d do differently if you attended again. Should you attend more seminars? Did you need more time to visit vendors than you anticipated? Would you like to pre-plan more evening events? Make a few notes for yourself that you can refer to when planning to attend again.

What do you do (besides unpack) when you get home from a conference?

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It turns out the folks at gwabbit are having a contest. I know I am always interested in the chance to win free stuff, particularly when the prize is a Flip MinoHD video camera, an oft-mentioned device here on WebWorkerDaily.

The contest is simple — the five folks who get the most friends to try gwabbit win the big prize. I don’t recommend spamming your friends and social-networking sites just for the sake of winning, but if you have some friends who might benefit from gwabbit, or are willing to help you out, this custom Flip cam is a nice prize.

Get full contest details to learn how to enter and win.

Does gwabbit help you with your contacts? What would you do with a Flip MinoHD?

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The price is unbeatable for lone freelancers and business owners, with a $0 price tag. If you work with a team that will need access to the software, it’ll cost 30 euros ($40) per user per month, with the first user free. Should the out-of-the-box package not have everything you need, Severa has add-ons available for a fee.

Severa succeeds in standing out from the field with one-click access to common features. The Dashboard (in the screenshot below) has a clean layout with good color contrast to help with quick scanning.

All of the fields, pages and drop-down menus are customizable so you can remove those you don’t need or add more options. Severa does a nice job of ensuring its forms display key information and limit the number of required fields.

You can search your data with keywords and limit searches to just one part of the application. Advanced search has a long list of columns to use as filters for searching. The right-hand side of the app holds a calendar and quick help box that changes based on where you point your mouse.

Viewing an account displays all of its contacts, cases and invoices. Like the rest of the app’s pages, the “Case” page avoids presenting too many fields. Cases come with a useful “Internal” tab for non-billable or internal work so you can track non-revenue producing activities. However, adding tasks to a case feels crude, as you can see in the next screenshot. It’s easy to make a mistake by not getting the format right. Those tasks are important when it comes to doing time sheets. The tasks will show up as an item so you can enter the time worked. This ties in with the invoice, which will reflect the time worked and the rate.

As an example, I created a new account called “WebWorkerDaily” (client) with Mr. Simon Mackie as the primary contact. I used this assignment in creating a new case from within the WebWorkerDaily account and referred to it as “Severa Project.” Adding the tasks came next, followed by entering my time for the assignment. So far, so good.

However, I hit a roadblock with the “Invoicing” and “Fees” sections. It took some experimenting before Severa finally spit out the invoice with the right information as it appears in the next screenshot. Once over the hump, I breezed through the application.

Severa has a sleek interface that lets you dive right in. It has a couple of minor obstacles, but so do most applications in this space. The CRM will suit those looking for a well-integrated and even-keeled solution, without feature overkill — it also sports LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Maps integration. Having CRM, project management and invoicing all in one app will make a lot of sense to many web workers.

The Finnish company’s software supports English (both U.S. and UK varieties) and Finnish.

What do you think of Severa’s CRM, project management, time tracking and invoicing solution?

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