Webware

Nokia has signed an agreement to acquire Cellity, a small German company that creates social-network contact management and address book aggregation services for mobile devices.

Cellity's 14 workers will become Nokia employees. But the service will be shut down and existing user accounts will not be transferred to Nokia.

Cellity, which was founded less than three years ago, is based in Hamburg.

Terms of the deal have not been made public. The acquisition is expected to close in the current quarter.

Acquiring small start-ups is nothing new for Nokia. It acquired Plazes last year while the locator start-up was still in private beta, for example. The mobile conglomerate also has a history of willingness to rebrand. After acquiring a media-sharing site called Twango several years ago, Nokia ditched the start-up's moniker and folded it into a new software division called Ovi.

The world got its first look earlier this week at Nokia's XpressMusic phone, a music-focused handset with loads of media-sharing and social-networking features including Facebook. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday, it appears that there may be a deeper partnership forming between the social network and the handset giant.

The two companies are reportedly just in talks, the Journal said, and there is not yet an indication as to which Nokia handsets would have the Facebook app. But it's possible that a compatible Nokia phone could link directly to Facebook profiles in its address book.

This is a big deal because Facebook, for all the hundreds of millions of profiles in its system, doesn't currently offer a great system for managing contacts. When blogger Robert Scoble attempted to use a script to export his Facebook friends' information to address book service Plaxo, Facebook promptly suspended his account. Facebook mobile applications for the iPhone and BlackBerry make it relatively easy to call or text a Facebook contact whose phone number is in the system, but you can't sync your contacts with a phone's main system.

The Journal article noted that Facebook also has been in talks with both Palm and Motorola regarding potential partnerships.

I spent a good part of the last week searching for a simple, free, and safe place to store my contacts online. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

The last time I synched my iPhone, iTunes offered to sync my contacts as well. I clicked OK without thinking. Before I knew it, I had lost about half of my phone's contact entries.

Backup? What backup? The entries in my Outlook and Gmail contacts were woefully outdated, compared to the contact information I stored in my iPhone. I had no choice but to reassemble the lost data phone number by phone number, address by address.

That was a good two weeks ago, and I'm still restoring the lost data. I vowed that this wouldn't happen again. What I needed was the online version of an old-fashioned paper address book.

What I didn't need was a full-blown customer relationship management (CRM) application, but those were all I found at first. I tried WebAsyst, Keepm, and BigContacts, but all three were overkill for my meager needs. (None of the three was able to manage the simple trick of importing my Gmail or Outlook contacts with anything approaching accuracy, either.)

I was about to bail on the whole project when I decided to try Flexadex, a Web-based application that gets your contact information online in a blink. The only fly in the ointment is that the service doesn't use Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, so all those addresses and phone numbers are flying over the Net unencrypted.

What really bugs me is that I wouldn't need a separate online address book if either Gmail or Outlook offered the meager contact management features I need. Have you ever tried editing your contacts in Gmail? Whenever I try, clicking the Edit button opens some entry other than the one I'm trying to change. Just getting all the names in "lastname, firstname" format is impossible.

Editing Outlook contacts is more straightforward, but the entries in your Outlook address book don't travel well. Outlook doesn't let you export to a file in the VCard format (.vcf). And none of the three full-size online contact managers I tried was able to import Outlook contacts without skipping or screwing up much of the information.

I followed the steps described in this Worker's Edge post from last August to move my contacts from Outlook to Gmail. Then I used Gmail's contact export function to create a VCard file I could import to Flexadex. As you can imagine, the result was less than perfect.

Fortunately, editing the entries in Flexadex is quick and simple. Just double-click a name to open its record, which consists of two text fields: Title and Contents. You can also send e-mail from the service, or e-mail a record using your own e-mail client.

Flexadex address book entries are comprised of two text fields: Title and Contents.

(Credit: Flexadex)

There's a big, big problem for anyone hoping to use this service for business. Your data isn't encrypted, so don't even think about uploading any information you wouldn't want to share with your competitors. In fact, I'm not comfortable storing the addresses and phone numbers of family and friends on the service until it adds SSL support.

If you're looking for an easy-to-use, free online address book--and you don't mind the lack of encryption--Flexadex might fit the bill.

Over the past few days, I've been using an upcoming e-mail helper called Gist.

Similar to Xobni (coverage) Gist is all about piggybacking on the e-mail systems you're already using to unearth information that's often tucked away. This includes the relationships you have with people you're e-mailing--both professionally and in your personal life.

The big difference is that Gist makes URLs, attachments, and conversation threads easier to get at. And instead of being relegated to Microsoft Outlook, like Xobni is, Gist works with Web mail too.

The service can tap into both Gmail and Outlook, as well as your LinkedIn account. In Gmail's case, this analysis requires giving Gist your log-in credentials. It checks in once a day, syncs up with the last 90 days of your in-box, then figures out the value of each one of your contacts by past correspondence.

Gist sorts out all my contacts to tell me who it believes to be the most important of the bunch. If I think it got it wrong, I can simply adjust the slider, and the list gets reordered.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's not a perfect system, as illustrated by the fact that it rated my boss' boss a 1 out of 100, but people with whom I regularly corresponded got high marks. Luckily, users can adjust the values that Gist has guessed to get it right.

"We believe that the algorithms can do a strong amount of the work, but ultimately, users generate that system," Gist founder T.A. McCann told me. Gist keeps two scores on each individual, one made by the user and one automatically generated by the system. McCann says the one created by the algorithm changes depending on your correspondence habits, so over time, the values should get more and more accurate.

Any links from your e-mails are gathered by Gist too.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In addition to tracking people, Gist tracks companies. If you've got it hooked up to a work account where you're corresponding with people from different companies, it will give you a breakdown of each one, using data it pulls in from Dow Jones. This includes a news feed of related Internet news stories based on keyword. Likewise, it will cross-reference and list any other contacts you're e-mailing at that company.

For those using Gist with Outlook, McCann says the plug-in Gist has developed is super lightweight and will not slow the program down. Instead of doing the heavy lifting in the background, it will tap only into given messages when you click it on from Outlook's toolbar. It then opens up any information related to that contact or e-mail thread, using a small borderless browser window, which can be dismissed in an instant.

McCann hopes to get Gist into public beta by this summer, alongside an iPhone application that will let users tap into all their data when away from their machine. The service is in a free private beta test version right now, but McCann says it is looking at going with a monthly subscription that throws in some advanced features to paying customers.

Flickr rolled out a big update to its inter-network content manager on Thursday afternoon. It now lets you sort by contact type, total number of photos, when you added them as a contact, and when their last upload was. This last option might be one of the most useful, since it can tell you who signed up for the service then abandoned it completely, making it easy to clear out some space.

The one thing that hasn't changed is the option to see more than a few contacts per page. The current cap is just 15 to a page, which might be fine for some folks, but Flickr power users with a lot of friends might find it limiting to have to guestimate what page they're on, or use the search function to track down a name. Oddly enough I had tweeted about loathing this just hours before the change. Update: One of Flickr's product managers Matthew Rothenberg pinged me back via Twitter to let me know the full contact list on a page feature is coming.

Also still missing is a way to mass edit contact relationships, or see which of your contacts does not reciprocate the contact love. Flickr currently has a cap at 3,000 of these per user, which means those coming close to that limit could use the tool to do some spring cleaning.

Related: Report: Yahoo layoffs hit Flickr

Flickr's updated contact manager now lets you sort through your contacts a number of ways, including the last time they uploaded a shot.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

European telecom giant Vodafone announced Friday that its Vodafone Europe BV subsidiary has acquired ZYB, a Danish company that specializes in online contact and calendar management. The price, as stated by Vodafone, is 31.5 million euros, or $48.7 million.

"Using a Web portal as a link between the PC and the mobile device, ZYB provides an interactive way for people to nurture, contact, and develop their relationships with their most important friends and colleagues and builds links with those contacts' wider networks," Vodafone's Internet Services Director, Pieter Knook, said in a statement. "This is Web 2.0 in action."

ZYB is, in a broad sense, a lot like a more mobile-focused version of Plaxo, the contact management service that was acquired by cable giant Comcast earlier this week. It stores members' address books and calendar data online and also connects them with friends who are also using the service.

Later this year, ZYB will be expanding its social-networking operations through a new project called Phonebook, which sounds a lot like Yahoo's OneConnect. Members will be able to see their friends' locations on a map, pull in feeds from external social services like Flickr and Facebook, and share calendars.

Robert Scoble couldn't do it, but Windows Live can.

Microsoft's Web-app division announced Tuesday that it has partnered with five social networks--LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo, and yes, Facebook--on a new project to facilitate address book portability. The partner social networks have agreed to use the Windows Live Contacts API so that members can import Windows Live contacts to their respective sites, as part of the new data-portability strategy that Microsoft outlined at its Mix conference earlier this month.

In return, Microsoft has launched Invite2Messenger, a new service for users of those social networks so that they can invite the members of their friends lists to join Windows Live Messenger.

This replaces "scraping," a widely used process of diving into one account on a social network or e-mail client's database to export contacts to another. It's technically unauthorized, and occasionally social networks make a stink about it--as Facebook did when blogger Scoble tested out a script that exported his friends list to contact management service Plaxo and had his account temporarily banned--and Windows Live representatives have said that an authorized API makes the process more secure.

It's already accessible on Facebook and Bebo, which is in the process of being acquired by AOL, and will be worked into the other three sites within the next few months.

Wired's Epicenter blog reported Thursday that rumors point to contact-management-service-turned-social-network Plaxo as Google's latest shopping purchase. Well, maybe.

The report is extremely thin, and very little detail is given except that the buying price is under $200 million and the buyer is "most likely" Google. Representatives from Plaxo said that the company does not comment on matters related to mergers and acquisitions.

It would make sense: Plaxo has been a loyal and vocal member of Google's OpenSocial initiative, and contact management is one thing that Google Apps really hasn't nailed yet. But Plaxo, like Digg, is one of those Silicon Valley properties that's constantly tossed about as an acquisition target. We've seen this one before. Move along, folks.

It's no shock that contact management site Plaxo has been a fierce advocate of data portability. As a result, it's not particularly surprising that the service continues to expand browser-to-desktop application functions: on Wednesday, the company announced that the latest version of its downloadable Mac client will sync the Plaxo Pulse social network to Apple's Address Book software. This comes in the wake of an announcement that data from Pulse--which aggregates feeds from social media sites like Flickr and Twitter into a common profile--would also sync with Microsoft Outlook.

A Mac address book entry with a Pulse widget

(Credit: Plaxo)

The new version of Plaxo's Mac client, available now, pulls a Pulse widget into entries in the Mac address book, displaying content from the feeds that the Plaxo member in question has hooked up to his or her Pulse profile. Additionally, as with older versions of the Plaxo for Mac application, the downloadable software will synchronize data from Apple's address book and calendar software with Plaxo's online contact management system.

Meanwhile, Valley gossips seem to be split down the middle on whether Plaxo, which has reportedly put itself up for sale, will be acquired by Facebook. The two share some intimate ties, as Plaxo co-founder Sean Parker went on to a brief stint as president of Facebook, but they have had very different strategies for data management--Plaxo aims to make data as open and portable as possible for convenience and flexibility, whereas Facebook keeps it behind closed doors for privacy.