Web Worker Daily

One of the reasons that I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard was the new ability to sync the Mac OS X Address Book with Gmail’s or Google Apps’ Contacts. This function has been around for a while, but for some reason, it was previously available only to iPhone users.

I really appreciate well-produced synchronization, because I’ve experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get right. It seems that software developers can never quite agree on how to organize contact information, so everyone’s databases are different. For a long time, for instance, one of the major makers of financial management software didn’t even create city, state and ZIP/postal code fields, opting instead for an address field where all of that information was run together, making the data very difficult to parse.

So I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Snow Leopard’s “sync with Google” function, especially because I have a fairly large address book, and most of its entries have photos associated with them, something that very few sync solutions even try to support. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the weekend updating my Mac to OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard. It went well, thanks to a little planning and a lot of patience. Windows users are facing the decision as to whether and when to upgrade to Windows 7. Here are some questions to consider when you’re faced with an operating system upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to wonder why real estate and insurance agents put their photos on their business cards, even though I’m not good at connecting names and faces. Then, a couple of years ago, two things happened that made me understand how useful adding images to contact info can be.

First, I started using social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook heavily. As a result, my address book ballooned from a few hundred contacts to over 1,100. The additional contacts were all people I knew, but I hadn’t seen many of them for a long time — being able to see photos makes it much easier to find the right contact. Second, I switched to a Mac as my main machine, and I started using the Mac OS X Address Book. It’s a very well-designed application, and it makes adding pictures to contacts incredibly easy.

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I had two friends complain that they received Facebook invitations from me today. I don’t remember sending those people invitations, and I never invite anyone to a social network without talking to them first.

My friends forwarded the invitations to me. They were dated yesterday, and the headers indicated that the messages were from Facebook servers. There have been recent reports of phishing scams aimed at Facebook users, though, so I changed my Facebook password, even though I don’t have any evidence that my account has been compromised.

But then I started thinking about all of the places that could potentially have access to my address book. My “master” address list is in the Mac Address Book app, but it’s synced to my web-based Google Apps contact list, and to the Thunderbird address book on my PC laptop. It’s also synced to my Palm Treo smartphone.

I’m pretty careful about passwords, and I respect the privacy of the folks in my address book. But I’m always trying new services, and it seems like everyone wants their site to have a social component. So the list of places that might have access to my address book is appallingly long. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, Google finally answered our pleas and introduced over-the-air contact and calendar sync for Windows Mobile and iPhone. Instead of a separate sync application, as with the Blackberry, the syncing works through the Exchange client already in the device.

I’ve decided to only sync my calendar between Google and my iPhone, which after one false start now works well. I didn’t bother syncing contacts. Why? Because nowadays when I need to find someone, the last place I seem to look is in my usually-outdated contacts application.

Sure, I have some contacts in my desktop address book which I sync back to Google with Spanning Sync. Mostly immediate family, doctors, school contacts, etc. Those few people I really need to call when out and about. Every work contact is in our organization’s CRM and is accessible through the Salesforce iPhone app. The rest of my life is either in Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn where the contacts themselves make sure their own data is up-to-date. All are easily accessible from my iPhone.

When I leaf through my desktop address book there are so many out-of-date entries, I often wonder why I bothered putting them there to begin with. I know there’s Plaxo for keeping an address book updated, but that utility comes with its own set of problems.

Let’s hear how other web workers handle their contacts.

Has your local address book been shoved aside in favor of web-based tools? Do you worry about the accuracy of contact data on your phone or desktop? How do you keep it all up-to-date and in sync?

The creation of Address Book 2.0 – the evolution of contacts applications into something more distributed, social and elegant – is a prize being hotly contested by many startups. Just recently, Web Worker Daily has examined Soocial, ContactHero and some of the privacy pitfalls of web-based contact books.

The latest to join the fray is Cellity’s Address Book 2.0, launched earlier this month, at the LeWeb’08 conference in Paris. The service promises to centralize and synchronize a user’s communication points from sources as diverse as Outlook, Twitter, cellphones and social networks.

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In early 2007, tech luminary Tim O’Reilly published a number of thoughts envisioning a more cohesive and universal ‘address book’ application for the Web 2.0 era…these thoughts were quickly labeled as Address Book 2.0.

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… Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s Address Book is a central repository for your contact information and makes your contact information available to many other Mac programs.  To enhance Address Book, take a look at an application called PostCheck, which adds some great improvements.

For starters, have an incomplete address in your contacts?  PostCheck will find the ZIP code if you have city and state.  And vice versa, if you have a ZIP with no city and State, PostCheck will find it for you.  Additionally, PostCheck will take your address and conform them to the USPS’ exacting standards for addresses.

The program is a mere $10 and is available on PostCheck’s homepage.