The LinkedIn Contacts app, which will launch just on iOS for U.S. users on an invite-only basis at first, allows you to pull together your Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and phone contacts into one contact database hosted on the app. (It also supports integration with some apps like Tripit or Cardmunch.) Contacts then lets you sort and filter people based on how often you contact them and lets you add details about your relationship to serve as personal reminders.

For instance, I can mark when and where I first met one of my LinkedIn conections, see when I last emailed that person in Gmail, call them on the phone (if they list their number), and see when I last met with them according to my Outlook calendar (if I used one of those).

These seem like useful features that could help you sort and categorize professional contacts, and it’s cool to see how LinkedIn has used algorithims and data to put together individual relationship histories for each contact without much work required from the user. However, it’s unclear why LinkedIn felt that these features should exist in a standalone app.

Will people really download a second LinkedIn app if they already have one that works just fine? These features seem like they’d be more useful if they were integrated into the existing app rather than launched in a second one. The company did indicate that it will evaluate how the product does on mobile in deciding whether to add features into the existing app, and users who gain access to the new Contacts app will have this data integrated into their contacts section of LinkedIn.com, which is smart.

Sachin Rekhi, the former CEO of the address book company Connected, which LinkedIn acquired in 2011, is now heading up the Contacts app, and he explained that LinkedIn wanted to keep the contact info in a separate app to better target the specific audience that would find it useful. Namely, professionals who want networking info on mobile. But it’s unclear which of LinkedIn’s existing members wouldn’t fit that description.

“We’re taking a multi-app strategy across different use cases and target audiences,” Rekhi said.

The other major downside to the app is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook or Twitter, so it’s fairly limited in the types of information it can actually import. The company would not indicate whether this was because Facebook and Twitter refused to provide access to those social graphs, or whether LinkedIn wasn’t interested in adding them. Rekhi said it’s because the Contacts app just focuses on professional contacts rather than more social features, so starting with apps like Gmail and Outlook made sense.

However, the increasing reality is that a lot of people do make professional contacts over Facebook and Twitter, and as Facebook improves its messaging and contacts products, it seems like a major downside that the LinkedIn app wouldn’t include those. Presumably, LinkedIn wants you connect with people over its own social network, wishing them happy birthday, calling them, and catching up with them on the Contacts app rather than through Facebook. But by not including Facebook’s social graph, it makes the app a lot less complete for younger users like myself.

So what’s the benefit for LinkedIn in producing this app? Of course, more eyeballs focused on LinkedIn and more screentime with the company’s products are always good for the company, and messaging and calling apps have become popular recently as companies try to hook users into communicating through their services. Importing all of your contacts and email information gives LinkedIn much more data to use as it turns your information into value for professional recruiters, who drive most of the company’s revenue.

Plus, as LinkedIn focuses its site on producing more news and media content, as evidenced by the Pulse acquisition, it’s possible it wants to make the main LinkedIn app more of a news reader and the Contacts app where you communicate with other individuals. But the company has a long way to go before it builds the equivalent of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

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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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The program has three major components: Calendar Cleaner, Contacts Cleaner and Sync Tune-Up. If you want just one of the components, you can purchase the first two separately at the Mac App Store. However it’s likely you’ll need all three so I recommend the buying the full package.

Contacts Cleaner looks for issues that could cause errors such as invalid characters, malformed phone numbers as well as duplicate information. What I like about this program is that it not only finds the errors, but tells you why it thinks they represent a problem. For example, I’d often put “husband and wife” in the First Name field, but Contacts Cleaner warns me “This contact has a space in the first name. In some cases these names can become transposed after syncing with Google.” Sure enough when I went into Google, I noticed that problem.

Calendar Cleaner does similar checks for errors that can occur with your various sync destinations. My calendar was fraught with malformed recurring events that wouldn’t sync, and a pass by Calendar Cleaner fixed those in no time.

Both programs give you the option of opening the item within Address Book or iCal in order to make sure you know what kind of change is being made before you authorize it. Apple’s Address Book application looks for merged items itself, but doesn’t give you options to control what is merged. iCal users have no built-in options to search for duplicates and merge events.

Finally, Sync Tune-Up (only available as part of the bundle) gives you a front end for more fine-grained control over fixing your sync-related issues, such as de-registering individual devices and software, or the “nuclear” option which rebuilds the entire sync database. If your sync is taking extra long or you’ve made a bunch of changes with your devices or accounts, a nice reset can do you a world of good. A good indication of problems can be found by looking at your console logs and looking for mentions of the “truth” and too much vacuuming.

The more you sync, the more likely it is that problems will occur. To prevent or repair these problems, Spanning Tools is a great option.

Disclosure: Spanning Tools provided a copy of the software for review purposes.

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As you can see in the video, the iCloud apps (running in the latest version of Safari on OS X Lion) look a lot like the redesigned Address Book and Calendar apps from Lion, as does the Mail app from screenshots I’ve seen. Apple’s decision to go for a unified look and feel between the web-based iCloud presence, Mac apps and iOS software is a great idea for encouraging adoption of cloud services among users new to the concept. One experience, no matter where you access from, really helps the learning curve and should help alleviate any concerns about privacy and security of access.

One other really nice feature about the iCloud.com beta: it appears to remember where you are when last you left off, even if you last logged in from a different computer, and delivers you right back to that same spot the next time you log in. It’s sort of like having Lion’s Auto Resume feature on the web.

Apple has definitely stepped up its game compared to MobileMe. Do you see yourself using iCloud on the web when it becomes available to the general public this September?

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The battle over who controls the information in your social graph — and specifically, who controls the email addresses of your contacts — continues to ramp up. Just a week after shutting down a Chrome extension that let you pull that information out of Facebook, the social network has flipped the kill switch on another service from Open-Xchange that provided a similar export capability. Although the company says its service abided by all the terms of the Facebook public API, it has become the latest victim of Facebook’s ongoing attempts to maintain control over the contact info of its users.

The shutdown of Open-Xchange’s address-book-exporting service makes the issue even more obvious, since it’s a more straightforward offering than the Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour. The programmer launched the extension last fall as a way of allowing users to move their contacts out of Facebook, after Google changed the terms of its API in order to highlight the social network’s refusal to allow users to export that data. But Mansour’s solution effectively just scraped the Facebook site — rather than using the approved API to access the data — and that’s expressly forbidden by the company, making it easier to justify the shutdown of the service.

Open-Xchange’s service, however, isn’t a scraper at all. It uses the social network’s approved API, and according to a press release from the company — which makes an open-source email server and collaboration system — it obeyed all the various restrictions that Facebook places on dealing with user data. According to an email from Facebook sent to the German company, however, the address book application was disabled because it allowed users to export email addresses of their contacts without the approval of each of those users. The Facebook email said:

You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use, but you can use connections between users who have both connected to your application.

In other words, in order to behave the way that Open-Xchange intended — by allowing users to import and consolidate their address books from different services and social networks — the German company’s service would have to require that everyone in a user’s Facebook contact list also join the service and authorize the export of that information. In the company’s news release, Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna railed against Facebook’s control over a user’s data, saying:

If you want to see what a future looks like where a single company controls YOUR personal data for its own profit, this is a glimpse. Clearly, Facebook management does not want you to have the ability to take your personal information outside their walls to, say, Google+ and will do everything in their power to stop you, including violating their own terms and conditions.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment and will update this post if we get one, but what the social network’s behavior in this case — and the case of the Chrome extension — makes clear is that the company believes it needs the approval of each user before it allows anyone to export their email addresses. As we noted in our post about the Chrome extension, Facebook executives have repeatedly said that they believe each user owns their email and other contact information, and that while it might be okay for email programs such as Gmail to allow export of those addresses, Facebook doesn’t believe that it should do this — and some supporters, including media analyst and author Jeff Jarvis, agree that they should not provide this info for privacy-related reasons.

What Facebook still hasn’t explained, however, is that users can easily export all of the email addresses and other information from their contacts by using a Yahoo email account. In fact, the Yahoo importer allows you to use Facebook Connect, so the whole process takes about three clicks. And iPhone users can also import and sync all of the Facebook data for their contacts, creating a single unified address book — in other words, exactly the same thing that Open-Xchange was trying to provide. Why are these other methods allowed when the Germany company’s export feature is blocked? That isn’t clear.

What is clear is that Facebook sees that contact information as a crucial resource that it needs to maintain control over, either because it doesn’t want to give new networks such as Google+ a leg up in gaining new users, or because it foresees some kind of privacy backlash if it allows widespread export of users’ email addresses. But Google — which has launched a full-fledged data export tool called Google Takeout, the product of an internal team called the Data Liberation Front — is unlikely to give up the fight.

Which raises the question: Do you mind if a user that you are connected to through Facebook exports your email address to use in another service such as Google+? Let us know in the comments.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Rupert Ganzer

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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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Updated: Facebook has responded to Google’s recent data blockade by effectively going around the barrier, according to a report today. Last week, Google changed the terms of use for its contacts API, which allows third-party services to pull the info from your Gmail address book automatically, and said that this would only be allowed if other services did the same — and the company has made it crystal clear that this was aimed directly at Facebook, which doesn’t provide that ability. Now Facebook is apparently using Google’s own contact-download feature to get around this blockage.

A source familiar with Google’s thinking said the company made a deliberate choice to go after Facebook on the issue of data portability. Although some observers were concerned about the impact that Google’s reciprocity statement might have on smaller players, the source said “this is not a blanket policy. [Google] is effectively enforcing it on a case-by-case basis — and Facebook is clearly the biggest, and the most closed” in terms of its data-portability policies. Google only went the API route, this source says, because attempts to convince the giant social network to open up went nowhere. “They tried the carrot approach and it didn’t work, so now they are bringing out the stick.”

Now, instead of automatically pulling in your Gmail contact list to find those users on Facebook, the giant social network has a button that lets you download your contacts from Google, then upload the file to Facebook, thereby accomplishing pretty much the same thing without Google’s approval. As The Guardian notes, this effectively takes advantage of the web giant’s own data-liberation policies, which make it easy for users to get their information out of Google’s databases. While Facebook recently added a feature that allows users to download their photos, wall posts and other content, it does not make it easy to pull your contacts’ email addresses (according to one of our commenters, however, this is possible if you use a Yahoo Mail import tool).

Now Facebook has used the search company’s own data-liberation policies to avoid the stick that the web giant is waving. Google could change the terms under which users can download their own data, or alter the process in order to make it harder for Facebook to get it, but that would look bad — and risks irritating users. In effect, Google is trapped by its own commitment to openness, and has to allow Facebook to import contacts without providing the same download feature. For now, at least, it seems that the social network’s “roach motel” approach to data will continue.

Update: A Google spokesman provided this statement on Facebook’s latest move:

We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Franco Bouly

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.