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Filed under: Social Software, Mobile

Orbit: mobile phone book plus social networking updates

Orbit is a mobile app that brings together your Facebook and your phone book. It's a phone book at heart, but it shows your friends' recent Twitter and Facebook status updates, and allows you to create groups called "orbits." You can turn the level of social noise from each orbit or individual up or down according to your needs. Of course, you can also initiate a call, text or email from within the app.

As long as Facebook won't allow phone numbers to be exported into your contact app of choice, something like Orbit seems to be the best solution for a light Facebook/phonebook combo. Being able to take a quick glace at a friend's latest Facebook or Twitter status before you call is a cool feature, but it's the customizable groups that really make Orbit appealing. Orbit's favorites list also changes dynamically, updating your favorite contacts depending on who you communicate with most often.

The only problem with Orbit is that it isn't out yet. It's coming to the iPhone and the BlackBerry before the end of the year, and if it turns out to be as useful as it looks on paper, it's going to have a permanent place on my iPhone's home screen.

Filed under: E-mail, Google

Gmail beefs up its contact manager

Gmail contacts
Google's contact manager for Gmail has left a lot to be desired for a long time. For once thing, up until recently it didn't have fields for birth dates, web sites, or other information that might be stored in your other address books. But today Google added support for birthday and website information.

Now when you import contacts in CSV format from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, or Yahoo, or vCard format from OS X address book, the additional information should be copied over correctly. Google added these features to its standalone contact manager a while back, but the integration with Gmail is a welcome addition.

Of course, if you've already imported a few thousand contacts from your Outlook Address book, you're out of luck unless you want to delete all of your Gmail contacts and start again from scratch.

Filed under: E-mail, Yahoo!

Yahoo! Mail now lets you sort email by "connections"

yahoo mail connections
Yahoo! has been talking about ways that the company can use social networking-style features to improve the email inbox. Now the company is rolling out a minor update to Yahoo! Mail that could certainly save you a lot of time and hassle, because it lets you sort your email messages so that you only wind up seeing emails from your contacts.

Here's how it works. First, you have to set up a Yahoo! profile by visiting profiles.yahoo.com. Yahoo! will scan your existing list of email contacts and suggest users that you might want to make "connections" with. Once you invite those users to be your connections, and they accept, they'll show up as connections. And then you can click the "From Connections" button in your inbox to only see messages from people you actually know.

This should help cut down on the amount of spam, bacn (does anyone still user that term?) and other less than urgent emails you have to deal with on a daily basis.

[via CNET]

Filed under: E-mail, Productivity, Google

Importing your email and contacts to Gmail is now much simpler



It's pretty simple to set up your Gmail to forward to Yahoo!, Hotmail or whatever other email account you might have, but not all of your other email accounts have a way to export contacts and messages to Gmail. The Gmail team has taken matters into its own hands and added new import settings that make it easy to switch to Gmail.

Now you can bring your contacts and mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, MSN, AOL and a bunch of others over to Gmail in a few steps, and have new mail from those accounts forwarded to Gmail for the next 30 days. That gives you time to let everyone know what your new address is. You can also label all of the imported mail, so you know which mail is coming from which account.

Filed under: Macintosh, Productivity, Social Software, web 2.0

Sync Facebook photos with Apple's Address Book

Back in the day -- OK, 2007 -- there was a spiffy little OS X app called Facebook Sync that pulled down your friends' contact info and added it to Address Book on your Mac. This was especially brilliant if you used iChat, because screen names would be imported so you could chat with most of your Facebook friends before there was a Facebook Chat. But Facebook Sync turned out to be too good to be true when Facebook decided it violated their Terms of Service. Address Book Sync partially fills the void by allowing you to bulk-add your FB contacts to Address Book -- minus the contact info.

What good is it if you can't sync screennames and email addresses? Well, you can still sync photos and birthdays, and at least you'll have an Address Book entry for each Facebook contact. Also, if you already like the photo you have in your Address Book for one of your friends, you can uncheck a box to have Address Book Sync leave it alone. If your phone can sync contacts with Address Book, this is also a fast way to have people's photos show up when they call you. Address Book Sync works brilliantly and doesn't violate the terms of service. Now, if I could just figure out a way to add contact info to all these new entries ...

Filed under: Windows Mobile, Productivity, Commercial, BlackBerry, iPhone, Mobile

Brad's favorite apps worth paying for: Pocket Informant

Pocket InformantYes, your PDA, cellphone, BlackBerry, or whatever it is you carry around in your pocket probably came with a calendar and contact manager. And they probably suck. Pocket Informant doesn't.

This personal information management suite was originally designed as a complete replacement for the PIM applications that come with Windows Mobile. It's now available for iPhone and BlackBerry devices as well.

The Pocket Informant calendar is nothing short of awesome. It offers agenda, day, week, and month views that are quite frankly more useful than anything you'll find in Outlook or Google Calendar. And they just happen to fit beautifully on a small screen. You can easily see at a glance how much free and busy time you have in a day. And you can link appointments to contacts, set reminders, and show tasks from your To Do list in your calendar.

Pocket Informant's search utility also puts the built in Windows Mobile search function to shame. Results appear almost instantly, and you can find top level information like a contact's name or phone number, or results that are buried down a bit deeper like a name mentioned in a note attached to a calendar item from a year ago.

Pocket Informant for Windows Mobile costs $29.95. The BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod touch versions are each $20.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, E-mail, Google, Freeware

iContact: Desktop manager for your Google address book

iContact
If you have most of your contact information tied up in your Gmail account but need quick and easy access to names, phone numbers, and email addresses on your desktop, iContact can help. Sure, you could set up Outlook or Thunderbird to sync with Gmail, but iContact is far easier to use and it even comes in a portable version that you can run from a USB flash drive.

Here's how it works. Install or run the application and enter your Gmail username and password. iContact will download your address book and allow you to instantly search by name, email address, or other field. If you occassionally need to look up a phone number to call in Skype or send a message to using a service beside Gmail, iContact could come in handy.

The program leaves a copy of all your contacts on the server so you can still access them from any computer. And you can add contacts to your Gmail address book using the desktop client as well.

[via MakeUseOf]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, VoIP

SkypeSync ports your mobile phone contacts to Skype


SkypeSync is a new service you can use to get all those numbers from your phone into your Skype list, so you can call them with SkypeOut, the Skype feature that lets you call regular phone numbers. It's built using the SyncML standard, which is supported by most recent phones, so the odds are pretty good that it'll work for your cell.

Here's how to use it: point your phone's browser at zyb.com, a free synchronization server recently acquired by Vodafone, and store your contacts there. Download and open SkypeSync (it's only available for Windows right now) and use its Synchronization Wizard to import your contacts from Zyb to Skype. Voila! You now have all your phone numbers ready for use with SkypeOut.

Obviously, the service is somewhat limited right now, since it only works with Zyb, but there are plans to support other synchronization servers soon. Right now, this looks like a decent solution if you're a big SkypeOut user, and don't want to face the prospect of manually entering every number you want to call on Skype.

Filed under: Developer, Internet, E-mail, Yahoo!

Yahoo! Address Book API now open to 3rd party developers

Yahoo! contacts
One of the most valuable features of any good email or IM service is the contact list. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and other companies that provide online communication tools also give you a place to store information about your friends, family, colleagues, and people who you met years ago and have completely forgotten about.

Yahoo! is making that much more useful by launching the Yahoo! Address Book API, which will let 3rd party developers create applications that can interact with your contact list. For example, you can use the API to develop an application that will scan your contact list to find other users who already belong to the social network you're signing up for, or a list of people you may want to invite. The API also supports contact synchronization, which could come in handy if you want to develop a tool that syncs online contact lists with Outlook or Thunderbird.

The API also provides the ability to create, modify, or delete contact information, which sounds a litle scary. But Yahoo! says write-acess is "available on a case by case basis," so developers will need to contact Yahoo! before creating a utility that has the ability to wipe out your address book.

Plaxo and LinkedIn have been using the API for a while, but Yahoo! is launching it publicly today.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Utilities, E-mail, Mozilla

Thunderbird Contacts, Hooooooooooooooo!

Thunderbird Importer
DownloadSquad reader Leni Mayo sent us a hot little tip. He has written a script called Zindus for Thunderbird which syncs Google contacts with the address book. It works on version 3.0a as well he says.

Here's a list of the fields that you'll be able to move from Google to Thunderbird:
  • Full Name
  • Primary Email address and Second Email address
  • Phone Numbers: Home, Work, Work Fax, Pager, Mobile
  • Instant Messaging (AIM)
  • Company and Title
  • Notes
There's a few caveats because Google handles contacts differently, so go check out Zindus homepage for a full explanation. It's worth it if you're a die-hard Thunderbirder.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows Mobile, E-mail, Freeware

DupeDeDupe removes duplicate Windows Mobile contacts

DupeDeDupeHave you ever read an article where the title pretty much tells you everything there is to know? Yeah, this article is basically one of those. DupeDeDupe is an applications for Windows Mobile devices that searches for duplicate contacts from your address book.

Paul at MoDaCo wrote the utility, and it's designed to work with AppToDate, which means you can automatically download any future updates.

DupeDeDupe compares each contact's "file as" and email fields as well as home, work, and mobile phone numbers. If all of those fields match, the application considers your contact to be a duplicate.

Overall, the tool is easy to use, fast, and best of all free. It should work on any device running Windows Mobile 5.0 or newer.

[via Jason Langridge]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Keepm keeps all your contacts in one place

Keepm
Over the years, odds are you've accumulated more contacts than you know what to do with. What's more, those contacts are spread out across an array of applications and services. There's your Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, and Hotmail contacts. There's the contacts stored in Outlook on your desktop. And then there are your social networking contacts on sites like Orkut and LinkedIn. Keepm lets you import all of your contacts from each of those locations and store them online in one place.

When you need to find an email address or phone number, you can then just login to Keepm and find it, no matter where you had initially stored it. You can also share individual contacts with others by sending an email from the site. And of course, you can export your contacts as V-Cards or CSV files.

While we'd be much happier with Keepm if it were actually integrated with an application that lets you use your contacts like Gmail or Outlook. Give us a tool that lets us combine all of our contacts and make phone calls or send email from that application and you will make us very happy.

Note that Keepm also needs your Gmail, Yahoo! or other email passwords to import your contacts. The site says it won't save your login information, but you do have have to trust the site before using it. But that should go without saying for any web-based contact manager.

[via CyberNet]

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Google

Google releases Contact API

Gmail loginShortly after releasing a tool for synchronizing Google Calendar with Outlook yesterday, Google released another key in the synchronization puzzle: an API for accessing Google contacts.

The API will enable trusted 3rd party sites to access your Google contact information without asking you to provide your login information. So next time Facebook, Plaxo, or another service wants to import your Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Talk contacts you might not have to give up your email password. Likewise, 3rd party software and web sites will be able to export contact lists to Google. And developers could write software that will keep your Google contacts synchronized with your desktop or mobile personal information manager.

In other words, if someone has some free time on their hands, they can write an application that will allow you to synchronize your Outlook and Google contacts. You know, like the application we were kind of hoping Google would release along with Google Calendar Sync yesterday.

Filed under: Photo, Utilities, E-mail, Freeware, web 2.0

Import faces from Facebook to Outlook with Outsync

Yes, you read the title line correctly. Outsync is a small, simple application that imports photos, and only photos, of your contacts from your Facebook account into Outlook.

With Outsync, you can easily replace old photos in your Outlook contacts list with shiny new pictures from Facebook, or add pictures to those contacts who previously had no image. Those shiny new pictures are then synced to your Windows Mobile device via Exchange server or ActiveSync, and displayed every time you make a call (or anytime your contacts are used).

The download is tiny, and setup is flawless. Of course it would be nice if Outsync would copy information such as email addresses or phone numbers, but apparently that kind of activity might get you banned from Facebook. Though some would use Outsync for good, others would use it for evil: i.e., downloading everyone's email address in order to bury them under a spam avalanche.

OutSync is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003, and requires Outlook 2003 or 2007.

[via gHacks.net]

Filed under: E-mail, Google

Is Google adding multi-protocol chat to Gmail?

Google ContactsIt looks like Google may be planning some new Gmail features. Many users are already noticing a "newer version" of the Gmail interface with faster page loading and an expanded contact manager. But did you notice that you can choose from a list of instant message services to flesh out our contact profile? Kind of funny, since you can only chat with other Gmail/GTalk users from within the Gmail interface -- or can you?

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System took a look at the updated Gmail code and found indications that Google would be adding support for Jabber transports. In other words, you may soon be able to chat with contacts using Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL instant messengers as well as Google Talk and other chat clients from within the Gmail interface.

Chitu also uncovered evidence that you'll be able to add colors to labels, and detach messages from conversations. We have to admit, we were a little underwhelmed with Google's latest facelift, but we're heartened at the thought that the updated contact manager is just the first of many changes coming soon.

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