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.
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.
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.
Have 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.
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.
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.
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.
It 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.
It might be a good idea to scrutinize your Gmail account more closely than usual these days. Not only is Google in the process of rolling out IMAP support, but it looks like some users are able to access a new version of Gmail. If you notice a new option that says "older version" or "newer version" at the upper right-hand corner, you're probably in. It should be right between the "settings" and "help" tabs.
Google Blogoscoped has a series of sreenshots showing some of the differences. Gmail 2.0 reportedly loads faster, although it's a bit early to say how much faster. And there's a much more detailed contacts section. There's a new contacts manager and the option to add images for contacts directly from Picasa Web. There also appears to be an option to "filter messages like these" from the Gmail "More Actions" drop down box.
If your account has the new interface, please let us know in the comments if you've noticed any other differences.
UPDATE: There are reports circulating that this could be a spam/email harvesting site. Use at your own discretion. As with any other email entry service, you have no idea what may happen with your address. Thanks Jeff.
UPDATE2: Please see Alex Rose comments below, webmaster of the service.
Have you ever scribbled down a new contacts email address, only to arrive to your computer and get frustrated with the fact that you can't read your chicken scratch? You are now left with two choices...send emails out to all different variations of the email address, or use Verify Email Address.
Verify Email Address takes the guess work out of whether or not an email address is active. The system verify's email addresses by connecting to the mail server in question and checking that the user name and mailbox exist. Of course this tool can also be used to check out how people have their mail servers set up, which could pose somewhat of a security threat.
Twitter and Gmail - some would say they're two great tastes that could taste great together. While these two services haven't quite melded into a cutting-edge new way to communicate and micro-blog at the same time, Twitter has just made it a little easier to find your Gmail friends who also have Twitter accounts. Like so many other services (Plaxo, Facebook, etc.), Twitter now has a twitter.com/invitations/gmail page that allows you to securely enter your Gmail credentials to see if any of your friends' and coworkers cross paths between the two services. After a brief waiting period (depending on how large your Gmail address book is; ours is around 500 or so), you'll be presented with a grid layout of boxes containing the names and images of Gmail friends who are also on Twitter. You can click each box to immediately begin following these friends, and you can specify whether you receive their updates via SMS as well. Links to each member's Twitter profile are also provided in case you need to double check just to be sure who you're following. All in all, we're pretty impressed with this integrated lookup between the two services, especially since Twitter can't seem to stop blazin' up the social popularity charts. This was a great idea, and it'll be nice to see Twitter hook into more email, contact and social services to help users tweet with even more of their friends and coworkers.
Highrise, the popular web-based contact and correspondence app from 37signals, has a new dedicated Tags tab in the dashboard. This will help users filter and sift through their contacts and notes much more quickly, especially since the company built in the slick ability to select multiple tags with which to filter. Clicking one tag in the cloud begins the process, while clicking another will switch to filtering by just that tag. After clicking a tag, however, the upper right of the tag cloud (pictured) will offer a 'Multiple tags' option. Once clicked, each subsequent tag you select will add to the filter, not replace it. This is a very smart way to offer the best of both worlds for everyone, no matter how they work and use tags to sort their correspondence.
Jaiku, the Finnish presence service, is turning up the heat on rivals such as Twitter today with the "ahead of schedule" final release of a dedicated Nokia Series 60 client for the service. The application, which runs all the time on compatible (switched on) handsets, has a pretty impressive feature list including:
threaded conversations
status updating
a live updating buddy status list
the sharing of phone-based calendars "to notify others of [your] upcoming events and availability."
The final release is now available on the Jaiku Mobile site.
Apple's new iPhone is wonderful and all, but what if the information you want to sync with it is caught between worlds? Perhaps your contacts are on your Windows PC at work, your music is at home on a Mac and your photography is stored on a friend's notebook. Fear not, power-synching-user, for Gearlog has discovered that the latest iPhone-friendly version of iTunes has you covered: while music, movies and podcasts need to come from one single library, you can actually set your iPhone to sync with a photo library on a different machine, and contact and calendar info from yet another machine, regardless of Mac and PC boundaries. Simply make sure each machine is running at least iTunes 7.3 and you're ready to start toggling checkboxes to build the perfect synching system between multiple computers.
Well that didn't take long; apparently Plaxo was planning to launch their public beta a bit sooner than we thought. Whereby 'sooner' we mean 'right now'; the company has just opened the Plaxo 3.0 doors to a public beta for one and all to sign up. Still offering most services as free, Plaxo is inarguably positioning themselves as the incontestable leader of synchronizing not only your own contacts and calendars, but also the information your contacts change in their own address books.
If you aren't up for trying out the 3.0 beta, perhaps a demo video and brief review from the omni-present Robert Scoble will give you enough information to help you lean towards one side of the fence or the other. Scoble has some of the same great things to say about Plaxo as we did, though he's running into some sluggish and flaky synching quirks (hence the all-too-disclaimer-ing beta badge). Nevertheless, it's clear that Plaxo has a great thing going, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look soon.
UPDATE: There are reports circulating that this could be a spam/email harvesting site. Use at your own discretion. As with any other email entry service, you have no idea what may happen with your address. Thanks Jeff.
Jaiku
