Blog
  • Store unlimited contacts!
    rajdeep 2011-08-16

    Can anyone truly say how many friends, co-workers or acquaintances one can gather in a lifetime? Neither can we! So, why limit how many contacts you get to save to your address book? With this principle in mind AddyMate has worked hard to make sure you aren't artificially limited by the size of your address book & can manage as many contacts as you please. We've made sure you can import any number of your contacts from your linked Google & Yahoo accounts. Whether you have only 10 contacts or 10,000 we're ready to help you manage them by weeding out the duplicates & connecting you with those contacts that are AddyMate users. So, go ahead & start building your address book by importing your contacts from Google, Yahoo or Outlook, we'll take care of the rest!
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  • Tag Syncing
    rajdeep2011-08-15

    As our address book grows with more contacts it becomes essential to organize them so that you can quickly look them up using associative words that are more intuitive than a contact's name. This is especially true of people you don't interact with often but deal with occasionally. More so, organizing your contacts helps you look up a subset of your address book at once rather than having to look them up one at a time.   The most popular way to do this is by creating groups and adding contacts to them one at a time. At AddyMate we felt there was a better, faster and fun way to do this. And that was through the use of Tags. While Tags have been available since the start of the service we've now enhanced the feature by fully syncing the tags you create & use in AddyMate with Google Contacts & vice versa. Here's what you get with Tags:
    1. Import your existing Groups from Google- If you've linked your Google account with AddyMate we'll import all your Groups into AddyMate & maintain the associations with your contacts by automatically creating the Tags & applying them to the appropriate contacts.
    2. Full 2-way sync with Google - Tags that you create & associate with contacts in AddyMate are automatically synced with your linked Google account.
    3. Quick tagging - Tags can be created & applied directly from your AddyMate address book without even editing the contact. Simply click on the Tags label for a contact & enter a name for a Tag.
    4. Quick tag based contact sort - Lookup up your tagged contacts by clicking on the Tag in the right tag cloud box.
      • You can then send a message to the tagged contacts from this sorted list.
      • You can also invite them to connect with you on AddyMate by sending out an invitation.
    5. Tag management - Manage all your tags in the Tag Manager where you can Add new tags, Edit existing tags, Merge several tags into one or Delete those that you don't need anymore.
    We're sure that you'll find this feature very useful & would love to hear from you on how you've started using Tags for managing your address book.
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  • We've LinkedIn!
    rajdeep 2011-04-15

    With most of us spending a third of our day interacting with co-workers it becomes important to have their contact info handy. This was one of the major initiatives we'd set at AddyMate -the ability to be able to pull up the contact info. quickly for the folks we've worked with in the past. The defacto place to maintain these professional connections as we moved between jobs was to connect with our colleagues on LinkedIn. Today, I'm excited to announce that AddyMate now provides you a common place to look up the contact info for your LinkedIn connections when you connect with them on AddyMate - in your AddyMate address book. This provides you the ability to lookup someone who you've worked with in the past & quickly get in touch with them for the next hot job opportunity, to get the scoop on initiatives at companies they work with or to get recommendations on vendors & service providers. And having connected on AddyMate you have access to their latest contact info. so as to avoid sending emails to an old company address that's expired with their transition from their jobs. You can now signup & login using your LinkedIn credentials or if you've already setup an AddyMate account simply link your LinkedIn account to your AddyMate account from under Settings. When signing up for AddyMate using your LinkedIn account we help you import your work profile & other info minimizing the details you have to fill out while creating your AddyMate profile. We also help in automatically connecting with your existing LinkedIn connections once they sign up for AddyMate as well. This is similar to the way in which you've connected your Facebook account with AddyMate. So, now with the ability to import your address books from Google, Yahoo or via a contacts export file, the ability to automatically connect with your social friends & family from Facebook & professional contacts from LinkedIn, we're declaring Mission Accomplished!! Go ahead, give it a spin & get more utility by linking your LinkedIn account to your AddyMate address book.
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  • Bigger, better, badder than before!
    rajdeep2011-03-19

    Spring is here! And with it a revamped version of AddyMate has been launched! We've been hard at work ironing out the wrinkles, improving the usability & aesthetics, adding major features and in general making it quick, easy & intuitive to manage your contacts from one place. Some of the changes you'll see are:
    1. Web UI changes to the site theme colors & iconography that lets you intuitively get in touch with your contacts.
    2. Simplified signup process that leverages your existing login details with Google, Yahoo & Facebook to create an account.
    3. 2-way sync with Google & Yahoo that makes it easy to access your contacts' details from your favorite web email service on your PC & your contacts from your smartphones.
    4. Enhanced Duplicate Manager to find & merge multiple contact details for the same person.
    5. Easily connect with others by inviting them to AddyMate so that you have their latest details.
    By no means is our work done & there are more exciting features we plan to introduce over the coming months including an upcoming support to link your LinkedIn accounts.
    So, hop on over & get AddyMate to start helping you manage your contacts while being able to control your own contact details using AddyMate's enhanced privacy settings.

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  • Sometimes you feel like Yahoo!ing
    rajdeep 2011-01-25

    A very Happy New Year to all! It's been a busy few months, and from the title of the post you can tell which major initiative we've been upto. :-) AddyMate is now fully integrated with Yahoo! What this means is that if you have a Yahoo! account you can leverage AddyMate to import your Yahoo! contacts to unify & synchronize your Yahoo! address book with the rest of your contacts. To get started 1. Signup & Login:

    If you've been holding out on signing up with AddyMate, you have one less excuse with our support for delegated login via Yahoo! Simply signup using your Yahoo! account & we'll pre-populate the signup form with your Yahoo! profile so that you have less info to fill out & create your AddyMate account.

    You can then use your Yahoo! ID to login whenever you want to access your AddyMate account. This means you'll have one less email address & password to remember.

    And if you have an AddyMate account already simply link it to your Yahoo! account under Settings.

    2. Import & 2-way Contact Sync:

    What would a contact management service be without support for importing & a full 2-way sync? While your signing up for AddyMate using your Yahoo! account we offer you the option to import your contacts to AddyMate & even help you detect duplicates pro-actively.

    With 2-way sync any changes you make in AddyMate are updated in Yahoo! & vice versa. This way you have access to all your contacts at all times especially when you're writing emails from within Yahoo! More so, if you have a Google account that you've linked to AddyMate, all your contacts in Google are available in Yahoo! & vice versa.

    This will help you maintain a truly unified address book across AddyMate, Google & Yahoo! & eliminate duplicate contacts.

    With this major integration with Yahoo! I've managed to finally claim all my contacts & manage them from one place - AddyMate.
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  • Your Contacts & Your Contact Details
    rajdeep2010-11-13

    Recently a discussion on who owns the rights to a person's contacts & their contact details, and what sort of tools does a service that stores these contacts for a person provide if a user chooses to take their contacts off the site, has been making the rounds of technology focussed news sites & blogs. This made it to the top of the news stories because of a move that Google made to alert users when they imported their contacts into Facebook using the latter's contact import tool. Google warned their users that once they imported them into Facebook they'd have no ability to export them out of Facebook. The war over an invaluable data set viz. the user's address book has taken center stage. There are 2 main points to this topic: 1. That a user should be able to move & manage his contacts the way he chooses, and 2. That a contact has the full & final right to their contact data in someone else's possession. Just about every popular service that we use as a communiation & networking tool has developed an address book - email service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail & Outlook, social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn & MySpace, mobile content management sites like iTunes & MobileMe, event creation sites like Evite, file delivery sites like YouSendIt etc. The extent to which you can communicate from within each of these sites varies but is mostly limited to the use of their specific services offered by them - you can email using Gmail using your Google Contacts, but not Outlook (atleast not directly), you can message your Facebook friends using their platform, not Gmail. More so, access to a user's contact list has been unclear when it comes to 3rd parties who enter into agreements with these sites. While the titans were figuring out their strategies to battle out the control of the contact data sets they store, we worked within the existing limitations & integrated to both Google Contacts & Facebook Connections. Google's very open API provided us the ability to support importing your existing contacts into AddyMate & establish a 2-way sync so that you can communicate with your AddyMate contacts from Google or AddyMate & keep your address books in complete synchronization. We worked with Facebook's limited APIs that provided us the ability to access only your connection's IDs by automatically linking you with your Facebook connections when they signed up for AddyMate. We at AddyMate believe in the principles of providing users convenient ways to access their contact lists & communicate with their contacts the way they choose to - may it be via Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or simply a desktop or mobile email client. We've enabled this via configurable email composer settings that will launch the appropriate email program when a user clicks on the email address of a contact. More so, we've put the AddyMate user back in control of their contact information so that they can pick & choose who has access to which email, phone number, IM ID, mailing address or just about any other contact detail they choose to share via their AddyMate profile. An AddyMate user can broadcast an email address to the world, share their home phone numbers only with family members, their work mailing address with their business associates or hide everything from the unknown public. We are also working on providing a way to export all your contacts to a popular .CSV file format so that you have a handy copy that you can use as you choose fit. Yet, we do this with full consideration to what the user has entered for the contact & don't export the details that an AddyMate connection has shared with the user. We believe this approach of letting users access & use their contacts the way they want to while enabling them to control what contact detail they share with others is the winning way for any consumer oriented service.
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  • Signing up using Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth... Oh My!
    rajdeep 2010-10-06

    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.
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  • Why should you start using AddyMate?
    rajdeep2010-10-05

    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.
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  • Coming soon!
    rajdeep 2010-09-18

    Thanks for stopping by & showing interest in AddyMate. To get an idea of what AddyMate is all about be sure to read the About Us section. We decided to build AddyMate to offer a dead simple way of managing all your contacts' info & communicating with them in one place. AddyMate also provides you a way to manage & build your online personal identity from one place. We're currently in a private alpha trial getting feedback from our friends & family to make this service useful for all others out there. To hear of our progress just follow this space & make sure to add your email to our visitors' list. We'll be informing you all as we start inviting more folks to try out the service.
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