Make the most of your contacts
E-mail scanners
WriteThat.Name (http://writethat.name) is a tool which keeps your Gmail contacts up-to-date. How? It scans the signatures of all incoming e-mails and compares the telephone numbers and addresses they contain with the information which has already been stored. If necessary, this information is updated automatically. If you disable the “auto update” function, you have to approve each change yourself. WriteThat.Name can be tried out free of charge for a month, afterwards you pay $3 or £1.85 per month or $20 or £12.40 per year.
Xobni (http://www.xobni.com) is an even more versatile tool which will shortly be available for Gmail too - for the time being it works in Outlook only. This plug-in automatically retrieves information about everyone you’ve ever e-mailed, again by inspecting the signatures. All contacts are listed neatly in an extra sidebar in Outlook. On the basis of their e-mail details, Xobni also scavenges sites such as Facebook and Linkedin in order to collect extra information and photos. You can also retrieve all the e-mails relating to a given person.
OutSync (http://outsync.codeplex.com - free) searches for correspondence between your contacts in Outlook and Facebook. A simple click on the Sync button adds the profile photos of the matched people in Outlook. Note. This tool is not 100% stable yet.
Information notes with e-mail options
Highrise (http://highrisehq.com) allows you to create a personal webpage (http://yourname.highrisehq.com) where you can save detailed information notes about your business relations, including contact details, background information, photos, notes about your latest contact etc. Tags enable you to retrieve this information easily later. You can import existing contacts, e.g. from Outlook. Conveniently, if you send an e-mail to a specific Highrise address, you can add tasks (for instance “ring customer X tomorrow”) to the corresponding information note, and you can be reminded of this task by e-mail. This e-mail address can have the automatic addition of an information note detailing the e-mail traffic. Highrise can be tried free of charge for 30 days. The fee-based formulas start from $24 or £14.85 per month (up to six users and 5GB online storage).
Who works where?
WhoWorks.At (http://www.whoworks.at) is a useful free extension for Google Chrome. This tool links information from LinkedIn to your surfing behaviour. For example, you surf to the Coca-Cola website, and with a click of a button you can find out which of your LinkedIn contacts is employed there. WhoWorks.At can also tell you who has been hired or promoted in the company recently. In the near future, this extension will be able to retrieve Facebook information too.
Plaxo Personal Assistant
Finally, there’s PlaxoPersonal Assistant (http://www.plaxo.com/products/PlaxoPersonalAssistant - €59.99 or £37.15 per year). It collects the contact details from various applications, websites and devices in one single address book. It also recognises incorrect and missing information.
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