Webware

The new contact manager pops up when you hit the "to" field in Gmail

(Credit: Google)

Gmail has long had a feature that automatically suggests and fills out the name of people you've corresponded with. On Tuesday night, the service got a tweak that makes that process easier--it's also likely to be second-nature to Microsoft Outlook users.

Now clicking on the link next to the "to" field pulls up Gmail's contact list manager, where you're able to very quickly sort through your contacts, or anyone you've e-mailed, and pick the ones you want to include in the message. The same goes for removing anyone; you just have to click on their name again and they get removed.

Not readily available when using this new menu is a way to select which of these users you want to add as CC's or BCC's. Outlook does this in the same menu, whereas in Gmail, you have to open up each of those fields in the message, then click to open up the contact manager yet again. Hopefully future versions streamline this process and combine those options into the same UI.

This may seem like a very small feature, but for heavy Gmail users it removes the need to create special lists of contacts they e-mail on a regular basis. Instead, it makes use of regular e-mailing habits and more deeply integrates the short list of people you're communicating with--the same one that's found in Google's contacts manager.

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.

Yahoo has added a small but useful feature to its Web mail service that lets users filter the contents of their in-box to see only the messages from their contacts. This means that if someone's not on your contacts whitelist, you don't see their message.

Short of Yahoo Mail's built-in filters and its connections sorting, this is one of the simpler ways to cut out any in-box clutter from people you don't know. However, there's some work involved on your part to build that list of contacts. To enable the feature, users must first create a Yahoo profile over at profiles.yahoo.com. Then add people they wish to list as contacts.

Besides sorting by connections, users will soon be able to sort by contacts. Here's what the in-box looks like before the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo )

And here's what it looks like after the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo)

One area where this terminology might confuse users is the difference between "contacts" and "connections." Yahoo Mail's help section refers to connections as "contacts with special status." In the case of mail, what makes them special is that you've interacted with them frequently, so the product assumes you know them. They must also confirm you as a contact before a connection is made. Contacts, on the other hand must be manually added, either through mail, or over on Yahoo's profiles site.

Yahoo Mail's senior product manager Rick Pal says this feature will only be available for Yahoo Mail users in the U.S. and Australia, and won't be rolling out to all accounts until a "few weeks" from now.

Update: Made a clarification on the difference between contacts and connections.

Previously: Yahoo puts meat on Open Strategy bones

Aimed at letting users share contacts more easily between different services, Google Contacts works like any other contacts function. You can import and export your contacts from other sources such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo, or Hotmail. For Apple you must use a utility called "A to G."

If you are part of a business, school or other organization using Google Apps, the administrator will have to enable this functionality within the control panel by clicking on the "add more services" link, finding the "Contacts" option and clicking the "add it now" button.

You can find the stand alone contact manager here.

Cloud Contacts, the online manager for offline business cards, has a new feature for users with camera phones. You're now able to snap a pic of a business card and send it off to get categorized with other contact cards you've sent in. There is no application for this, you simply send off a copy to a special, private e-mail address.

Unlike competing services Evernote and Shoeboxed, Cloud Contacts creator Allen Stern says his system brings more accuracy to the table since each submission is handled by real people instead of machine scanning (update: Shoeboxed has people looking over the data too). This can be far more important with camera phone pictures since your phone's built-in camera tends to focus about two to three feet away, making the text on business cards quite tiny.

If you've got an iPhone and are thinking about using this service, worth checking out is Griffin's Clarifi case, since it lets you focus about four inches away from a business card.

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.

Gmail now lets you merge multiple contacts.

(Credit: Google/CNET News)

One of my beefs with Gmail, a service I otherwise like, is its propensity to create duplicate contact entries for the same person without any action on my part.

I'm not sure if this is part of its internal workings for identifying contacts, an issue synchronizing with iPhones and Exchange, or something else, but it's annoying. On more than one occasion I've had to recombine my own entry back down into one contact, and I've had to do the same with my wife's entry, my parents' entries, and others.

Of course, there are legitimate occasions when Gmail might have multiple entries for the same person, such as when a friend whose personal e-mail address you use then e-mails you from her work address.

Google now offers to treat the symptom, if not the disease. There's a new "Merge these 2 contacts..." link that appears when you select multiple contacts. Clicking on it presents a unified entry that you can save, modify, or cancel as you see fit.

(Via the unofficial Google Operating System Blog.)

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.