contact books

I'd like my contact book to have these features:

  1. Automatic scheduled synch with all my PCs, my blackberry (wirelessly), my Yahoo account, and any FTP servers I specify.
  2. Structured full-text index. It is amazing that this is still not part of Windows. cf x1.
  3. 1click History of all emails sent to/from the current contact, directly invocable from an email from someone, or from their contact record.
  4. 1click Contact from entry to intiate email to that person, or to open IM to them if they are online.
  5. 1click Map from entry, with driving directions. It should remember my favorite mapping service.
  6. Knock-Knock IM search allows me to enter "Joe Mahoney" and have it automatically instantly search all my contacts contact books (via a silent IM) asking if they know a Joe Mahoney. When it finds a match, it then does a visible IM to that person saying
    "Paul English is looking for Joe Mahoney, should I give him this record..." with buttons "[Yes] [No]" and options
    [ ] always do this when Paul English searches
    [ ] always do this when anyone searches for Joe Mahoney

Contact Management Software

  • Yahoo Address Book is fairly cool, like most Yahoo software, and gets updated with latest sync requirements etc, and is known to be available for a long time.
  • ECCO Pro was the best PIM software many years ago.
  • neo is supposed to make Outlook more useful
  • Pocket Informant is a good PDA PIM
  • Intellisync is the leading synchronization software (Palm, Outlook, Yahoo, etc) even though it is clunky and buggy. :(
  • StarFish TrueSync started out as a really slick address book (by Borland founder Philippe Kahn?), but then morphed and was acquired by Motorola and then by Puma/Intellisync. :(
  • Multi-Sync is an open source sync program.
  • ACT! has millions of small business users, including lots of sales people. Their founder then started Salesforce.com ASP.
  • contact.com was a dot bomb; the domain name is not used now; I want to own it. :)
  • OxygenSoftware for phones. (Some guys from Russia.)

See also my page on social networks.

paulenglish.com - articles - startups - nonprofits - press 31-Dec-2005