ContactHero

Riffing off a recent post by Imran Ali, “Soocial: The Best Address Book You’ll Ever Use?,” I thought I’d put in my impressions about another contact management service – ContactHero. ContactHero is looking to be your most favorite and most used contact manager, aggregating all of your important contacts into a single place and making them easier to edit and organize them.

You can import contacts from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, among others, and includes an API to integrate ContactHero into your existing contact management systems.

You can sort contacts by first or last name, company name or most recently added. ContactHero gives you the option to populate fields if you are entering contact information for several people from the same company. There is also a co-worker link so you can toggle through contact listings you’ve entered for any contact’s colleagues.

ContactHero also includes a call reminder feature and you can receive a daily digest of reminders of the calls you have to make via email. Use their drag and drop calendar feature to manage your call schedule. And you can access a calendar view of all scheduled calls.

You can schedule emails to go out to your contacts and post-date them for future delivery. You can share contacts as text or VCard attachments. You can also export and download all of your contact data to standard formats such as CSV, XML, or vCards.

Search functionality not only includes first and last name or company name but you can assign tags to individual contacts as well to make the search more intuitive for you. I like this feature. I personally search my contacts by first name, but I also often forget someone I met at a conference and all my brain can muster is “that new social networks for women business owners.” If I tag that contact “social network” or “women business owners,” I’d be able to drill down to find the contact I need.

More Frills

As I dig deeper into applications these days, compatibility and functionality on my iPhone is key. ContactHero actually has a finger-friendly interface for mobile devices, and it doesn’t require an application download.

Some other bells and whistles include maps for each contact or group of contacts and icons to identify your contacts. Or upload a photo or several photos to any contact. Click on a contact, and you get a popup window with more details rather than being led away from your contact list. Close that window and the contact list is still there. Click to dial a contact straight from the ContactHero interface or click to email them directly.

ContactHero knows the value of tracking call history. You can link a contact to a call, add notes to contact records, and even attach messages to the contact. I tend to take notes during phone calls in a spiral notebook (yes, incredible but true), and it can be tedious flipping through handwritten pages to find notes from previous calls. I really need to upgrade my call management system and how.

One thing ContactHero isn’t trying to do – at least not right now – is merge social networking functionality with contact management ala Plaxo. They seem to be sticking to anticipating all of your contact management and contact communications needs from a practical standpoint.

ContactHero does cost money. Pricing is pay-as-you-go at $9.99 per month, and they offer a 30-day free trial before committing to their product.

Do you pay for a contact management system right now? If not, what would it take to convince you to pay for one?

-images from ContactHero.com

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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.

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