AddressBookONE Goes Live
September 13, 2010 7 Comments
On the 13th September 2010, the AddressBookONE service was officially launched.
AddressBookONE is a contact web portal, collating your scattered contacts and multiple address books into one simple, intuitive user interface. Bringing together contact information from Gmail, Plaxo, LinkedIn and Facebook, amongst others.
The main features that AddressBookONE offers are:
- Single Point of Management: Bringing all your contact data together in one easy to manage, intuitive user interface.
- Contact Merge: Merges multiple instances of the same contact to give a more complete single view for each contact record and eliminates duplicate data.
- Mobile Device Sync: Synchronizes AddressBookOne with almost any mobile phone or PDA. Allowing you to manage your mobile contacts and putting all other desired contact data in the palm of your hand.
- Social Contact Connections: Share your AddressBookOne contact profile with other users.
- Feature Rich Contacts Manager: Edit existing contacts and add new ones, organize contacts by single or multiple groups, star and hide contacts and filter data displayed.
There are two types of subscription available, Standard and Premium:
- Sign up to our Standard service, and use AddressBookONE for free
- Sign up to our Premium service NOW and take advantage of our ‘Early Bird’ price of just £19.95 for 12 months, saving you £10.00 (representing a discount of over 30%), as well as benefiting from our Premium features;
- Mobile Device Sync
- Unlimited Social Connections
- Premium Customer Support
Your programmers have done a wonderful job on the interface.
I signed up for the free service 10 minutes ago (or less), connected to Google Contacts and Facebook, and voila — everything is working nicely.
Not only that, your interface itself is fast and slick (although I’d like an option to reverse the colour scheme around — white text on black can look cool, but for readability MANY people prefer what almost everyone else … including Facebook, LinkedIn, MSN, Google Contacts, and these other huge and successful companies use — black text on white.
There is a REASON that is more popular. People of all ages can read it with much less effort.
So that critique aside, the service seems to work great. However, you can only connect to four services now. Despite the graphic above indicating MSN (a.k.a. “Windows Live”) is an option, it is not. Not yet, anyway.
Until I can bring in at least my Windows Live contacts, and preferably Skype, Yahoo, and ICQ contacts … this service would be “gee whiz” nice to know that it existed, but not worth upgrading to as a paid subscriber.
Since I would have one less address book to check, maybe, but would still have several more to go through.
Finally, AddressBookONE is read only, right? It won’t update Google Contacts or any other service, correct?
Let me just add a final thought.
I don’t know if you only have four services available now — Google Contacts, Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn — or whether those are the only four options for the free account, and the paid account offers more options.
However, you should show ALL the possible options to free customers. Then, when setting up my account, after having set up three of them successfully (it really is easy to use: bravo developers! Although one bug is instead of “line breaks” in Google Contact notes, you get a whole bunch of ugly p tags with no line breaks) … after having set up three, and seeing a bunch more available to me where I have contacts, it is at that moment where I would feel a strong desire to pull out my credit card and do this thing properly.
If you catch my drift?
Actually, Google Contact notes import perfectly (fortunately! That’s awesome.)
The open and closing p tags and lack of line breaks were imported from Facebook. Where from, in Facebook, I have no idea, because I don’t see it on the contacts’ wall, info, etc., but I’m sure it’s there somewhere.
I have another suggestion: What about exporting contact birthdays and anniversaries to a password protected iCal calendar?
Christoph,
Thanks for you feedback. A few of the suggestions you’ve made we are currently considering: black text on white background could become an option, for example. If you do have any other suggestions, post them on our forum so others can take a look and make similar suggestions, which will increase their priority with us.
We launched with 5 connections, the four you mention plus Exchange. A few teething problems with Exchange meant it was temporarily taken off the list, it should be back up shortly.
We do plan on adding more connections very soon. Currently Windows Live is our main priority, along with Yahoo and Twitter.
Concerning the p tags and any other bugs you may find, the best thing to do is to report them on our helpdesk. This way our technical team can see to them as soon as possible.
The AddressBookONE Team.
Thank you for your reply.
For a new release of a brand new product, I think you have done a smashing job. I was impressed by just how easy the address book is to use. I think it’s as easy to use, if not easier, than Google contacts, and I’m similarly impressed with it.
I’m a paying GooSync customer and I would definitely consider (as in almost certainly will) upgrading once the additional services are added. And I can quite understand why Windows Live and Yahoo! are your priorities … although I hope you get Skype done too!
Final suggestion — which I’ll repeat on the forum — is (perhaps read-only or, like Google calendar does for events on mobile browsers, a “quick-add” protocol, like say first name, last name, and phone number) mobile browser access. Perhaps this could even be limited to paid accounts so as not to undercut reasons to upgrade to your mobile Sync service.
I would give this service 4 out of 5 stars now, but I grade very, very hard. Most people as impressed as I am with your initial release would give it 4½ or 5.
And you’re just getting started.
Christoph
P.S. From a business point of view, I think you made a wise choice in creating this product. I was leaning toward dropping your excellent GooSync service at the end of my two years and getting a ‘droid or iPhone. This gives me an excellent reason to remain one of your company’s customers. The value you can provide with AddressBookONE is significant to me.
Oh. You do have mobile WAP access. And it’s formatted perfectly for my 240×230 mobile display.
This is awesome. I can’t even get Google contacts conveniently on my phone. I’d recommend this to anyone.
Get Yahoo and WLM and I’ll upgrade.
*240×320