Xobni, a very useful Microsoft Oulook plug-in that we’ve covered with praise previously, has just released a new update that now reveals more information about your contacts, including acquiring valuable data from their Salesforce account. This has been a much-demanded feature that is available for all Xobni users for free at this time. Ultimately, there will be a small fee for this feature but the return on investment for those organizations that use Outlook and Salesforce will make the decision a no-brainer.
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The folks at Ribbit Mobile are offering 100 invitations to WebWorkerDaily readers for the beta of their new communication service. Just sign up on the reservations page, and enter the invite code “wwd09″ in the appropriate box.
Ribbit Mobile has more features than Google Voice, and reminds me a bit of VoxOx, which I wrote about a few days ago. This service looks very promising, but, like VoxOx, it isn’t finished yet. I’ve been unable to test it fully, because it doesn’t yet support Sprint cellphones. I also can’t get my contact list to import, either from a CSV file or through Plaxo (the only options Ribbit Mobile supports). I hope to post a fuller review soon.
Try it out, and let us know how Ribbit Mobile works for you.
Gmail. LinkedIn. Facebook. Your phone’s address book. Your contacts may live in many places online, yet there’s always the possibility one of these places will disappear or crash, taking your information with it for good. Or perhaps you simply decide to close your account with the network.
You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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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 »
When it comes to truly professional “social” networks, there are far less than general interest and entertainment-oriented networks. Ryze is virtually dead. Xing is more global. The old standby is LinkedIn although it still struggles with its Web 2.0 features. Facebook is still trying to overcome it’s school focus in some professionals’ minds. Plaxo has tried to capitalize on their previous incarnation as a contact management system. And hybrid online/offline communities such as BizNik tend to be more niche or regionally focused.
Enter Konnects. Konnects wants to fill in the gap between LinkedIn and Facebook, providing social tools for a younger professional who may not quite have enough contacts to make LinkedIn really work for them but want to focus on business more than Facebook promotes. Konnects wants to be not only the place where business professionals can find one another but also the place where they can transact business on the site, exchanging all of the information and documentation needed to solidify a working relationship.
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When people ask what I do, I usually say “I’m a writer.” But I do so much more than writing articles and posting content on blogs. Since I first got online in 1987, I’ve been using the Internet (or at that time, Bulletin Board Systems) for not only communications but for community building – for my own projects and for clients. Today, there are so many ways I’m building online communities and although the tools have changed over the years, the rules haven’t.
Here are some of my thoughts on rules of online communities:
1. You can’t own a community. A lot of people who start and build communities immediately assume ownership. They get lawyers to craft a Terms of Service that says that they own everything posted within a community. They set the rules in stone and police the community. While I understand why companies want to “protect their assets,” ultimately, online communities can be fickle and rebellious. They do not want to be owned. Trying to turn a community into a commodity is ultimately a recipe for failure. Read the rest of this entry »
Late Friday Google redefined who you are on the net with the release into the wild of the Google Social Graph API.
Last week, your Amazon profile didn’t know who your connections were on Plaxo Pulse, your career history on LinkedIn or that you were using Twitter to talk about how much your day job sucked. Now it can – or will, if online social networks applications get on the Google bandwagon and – fortunately – you give your active permission.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
