Gwabbit's handy contact slurper gets cloud sync
Contact-slurping tool Gwabbit now has a cloud-based tool that will seek out new contact information from the Web and amend it to your e-mail contacts.
PALM DESERT, Calif.--Gwabbit, the contact-slurping tool that launched at last year's Demo conference has made the much-needed shift to the cloud.
The new tool offering, which the company is calling the "gwab-o-sphere," takes the contact information gathered from incoming e-mails and syncs it with updated information from places like Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com. If changes are made by these users in any of these locations, the updated information is ferried back over to Gwabbit, where it's synced back out to all the clients with the Gwabbit plug-in installed.
The need for services like this has become greater, due mostly to the rise of people having to maintain profiles or personal information in a number of different places at once. While this works fine if those contacts are good about updating the information across all of these networks, it breaks down when you go searching for it in one of the places they haven't yet updated. This is especially true if someone on your contact list switches jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum to Gwabbit's gwab-o-sphere, is Atomkeep, a company we blogged about back in late-2008. Unlike Gwabbit, it solves the problem of updating information in different places by letting users sync a profile change across more than 30 services at once.
Gwabbit said the gwab-o-sphere will be launching as a free feature to its paying users in the next month or two. You can find downloads for the service on Outlook and BlackBerry phones, over at Download.com.
See also: Competitor Xobni, which popped up on BlackBerry phones last week.
