If you still use a paper Rolodex for storing your contacts/business cards then I’m not really sure your ready for this article. If you are still using a paper Rolodex for storing your contacts/business cards then you NEED this article. In this day and age of electronic everything people are storing their contacts in many different ways. There is the ever popular telephone method in which you store all of your contacts in your phones contact list. This method usually works fairly well until you accidentally drop your phone in a cup of water and then you loose all of your contacts.
Enter the Internet
The Internet is a great place to store all sorts of information including contacts. Even if your computer hard drive fries on you and you loose everything if you have information stored online it is still available to you at any time. One good service that some companies offer is wireless contact back up which is good as long as you are staying with that company. This option will keep an online database of contacts in sync with the contacts on your phone. I like this option but it limits you to only be able to access that information if you stay with that phone company. At first this may not seem like a big limitation but if you decide to switch phone companies you may find yourself in a tight situation.
There are many different online solutions but I will discuss two of the more popular ones which are Mobile Me, a service created by apple to be an online space in which people can store data files, retrieve email and store/share photos (for $99 a year). The next product is Google Contacts which I had actually not heard of until recently. This project is still in it’s BETA phase but from what I can see is very stable.
Mobile Me
The benefits to mobile me is that it is an apple product which will work very well with other apple products such as the iphone. Mobile Me also has software for the PC so these users are not alienated. A few drawbacks however are that it’s mail interface is not as robust as other products such as gmail and it’s calendar functionality is also limited if you use google calendar already.
Google Contacts
The first benefit I see with virtually any Google application is that it is usually free and the same deal is received with Google Contacts. This application allows you to store and group all of your contacts and can even import existing contacts from Gmail (if you currently use it) or a CSV file which many online contact back up systems can generate. If you are a current Google user you will enjoy the ability to work with your calendar, contacts, and email all from one system. If you have a smart phone you can also use Google Sync to sync your calendar and contacts with Google’s applications. This gives you a full solution to the issue of storing and retrieving your contacts and best of all it’s free.
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