One of the principles we’ve applied to the AddyMate service is that users shouldn’t have to painstakingly replicate all the profile & contact info they’ve created on other online services.

One of my biggest gripes has been creating account names & passwords for all the services out there. Sometimes I get lucky & get to specify the common username that I’ve used on other services. But in some cases I have to come up with a choice that makes it hard for me to recollect what I’d chosen. It’s even more harder with passwords when services have their own security rules to conform to.

We decided we’d use a method that would leverage an attribute that users would remember easily – their email address. More so, we wanted to leverage users’ ability to reuse their existing login credentials at Google, Yahoo & Facebook through delegated logins – no more “borrowing” passwords. These mechanisms leverage open standards that have been the basis for a lot of the cross platform synchronization functionalities built into AddyMate – OpenID, OAuth & Facebook Connect.

Thus, when you signup & login into AddyMate you’ll have the choice to use the traditional email/password method or use the delegated methods using OpenID, OAuth &/or Facebook Connect. The latter 3 methods are preferable because it helps us to automatically populate your Profile & import your contacts, all in one seamless flow at the time of signup.

You also have the ability to link any & all of these services even after you’ve signed up. This enables you to choose any of the delegated login mechanisms to login into your AddyMate account. By adding all your email addresses to your profile we help you consolidate your dispersed identities into one unified AddyMate profile.

Just another thing we’ve done to make life a little less complicated.

When it comes to managing my contacts you’re probably like me. I used to have my contacts all over the place in various email accounts, on multiple machines, in the address books of various mobile phones, having collected the contact info for all the people I’ve met in disjointed places. Sometimes this info has languished in my box of business cards as well because I never got around to entering them in one place. Personal life changes like buying a new computer or phone or switching computers when changing jobs would simply make it even worse.

Occasionally, I’ve had to dig around in my various email accounts – Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or phones because I wanted to get in touch with someone. Needless to say this made me lose a lot of precious time. And a lot of the times, the info I had for that person was outdated that my emails to a buddy from the past would land up in an unattended mail box or worse, the phone number I had for him would have been disconnected.

More so, the thought of losing my address books to a hard drive crash or loss of a phone energized me into devising a solution where I’d be able to store all my contacts in one unified address book which would be accessible from anywhere & from any machine.

While social networks were great at getting in touch with long lost friends, I would hesitate in exposing all my social activity by befriending them. I have a way to connect with friends & family in my immediate social circle on Facebook, & ex-colleagues on LinkedIn, but what about the rest who don’t fall into these specific relationships?

AddyMate offered me the ability to maintain my address book for all the people I’ve come to know so that I have a way of reaching them when needed, but without necessarily establishing a pseudo relationship through these social networks. By connecting with these people on AddyMate I could benefit from being able to reach them at their most current coordinates, and in turn offer my connections the ability to reach me where I wanted to be contacted.

You can benefit from this as well by using AddyMate to aggregate your address books outside of your social networks & decide what contact information you share with each person.

As you go back to school, take up a new job, or make new friends you can hold onto their contact info with the reassurance that you have the ability to access this anytime you need it. Life is complicated enough to not have the ability to reach someone slow you down.

Start using AddyMate so that you can start organizing an important part of your life.