Various apps like Bump and CardMunch are available for certain platforms, but for many the answer is still cutting and pasting information out of email signatures into various digital address books and updating it manually when friends or colleagues send out the, ‘hey, I got a new number!’ email. ContactMonkey aims to offer a better way.

The Toronto, Canada-based company was started by Scott Pielsticker last year after he returned from a trade show with hundreds of business cards and faced the time consuming task of updating his address book. His solution was ContactMonkey, a sort of cloud-based online business card (here’s Pielsticker’s as an example) you complete with your details and then share with contacts as a URL or QR code. Associates can then easily download all your details to any of 19 kinds of address book with the option to receive a notification whenever your details are updated.

The service is free to individuals, while companies are charged $3 per user per month for “white label” ContactMonkey pages, which feature a firm’s branding. Users can also receive notifications detailing exactly who has downloaded their details, a feature that seems likely to appeal to anyone interested in lead generation. So far 10,000 people are using the service, with particular interest from sales-focused professional services firms like lawyers and real estate agents. The company also just received $800,000 in seed funding from Plazacorp Ventures and angel investors, which it intends to use to ramp up its sales operation.

“The basic idea is very, very simple,” says Pielsticker, boiling down his product to its essence. “Most business people have an email signature and the premise behind that is we want people to be able to communicate with us. ContactMonkey makes it easy for them to actually grab those details. I don’t care if you’re using Outlook, a Blackberry or an iPhone. I want you to have my details irrespective of what device you’re using.”

While many digital natives may be content to search their email for a contact’s details and experience no difficulty keeping in touch with their networks, ContactMonkey seems like a painless, platform-agnostic solution for those who are frustrated by incomplete and out-of-date address books. If that’s you or your clients, check out the service.

Are you frustrated with keeping your address book up to date or are you pretty content an ad hoc system? 

Image courtesy of ContactMonkey.

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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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