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Gmail Contacts Get Selective
Posted by Adam Pash at 6:00 AM on July 16, 2008
Gmail appears to be slowly rolling out a new feature in their Contacts application that allows the user to selectively determine whether or not you want to automatically add everyone you email to your contact list. You're likely to send and receive a lot of email in the course of a day, but if you would prefer to keep the people in your contacts list limited only to the people you add—which means a much cleaner, more streamlined list of real contacts as opposed to all 5000 you've accumulated with the old system—looks like you can now do that through the My Contacts pane. Like most things Gmail-related, Google appears to be rolling this out slowly. If you're seeing this new functionality in your account (we aren't yet), let's hear more about it in the comments. Thanks Matthew!
Outlook add-on Xobni has integrated with professional social networking site LinkedIn to enhance your contact information with job and employer details when possible. Using Outlook but not Xobni? 
Windows only: Freeware application iContact downloads your Gmail address book to your desktop for quick access to all your contacts' information. Searching contacts in iContact is very fast, but the main benefit of the application is its built-in support for other tools. For example, you can make a phone call with Skype or map a contact's address with Google Maps with just a couple of clicks in iContact. The application is very young, and it was a little buggy in my tests—for example, contact names didn't show up in the sidebar until I started searching. Aside from that, it's a promising app for integrating your extensive Gmail contact list with your desktop. If you give it a try, let's hear how it performed for you in the comments. iContact is freeware, Windows only. Thanks Khash!
The Official Gmail blog points out a small new feature update in Gmail that allows you to edit contact information on-the-fly directly from your chat list. In short, when you hover your mouse over a contact in chat (or an email), the name in the pop-up details window is now editable. Since the chat pane is really the quickest way to search and access your contacts, it's a great way to quickly add meaningful names to your contacts—especially since Gmail's contact management tools are still a little unwieldy. Small improvements like that could go a long way in boosting Gmail's status as a 
Thunderbird only (all platforms): Thunderbird extension Contacts Sidebar pulls Thunderbird's built-in contact management out of obscurity, making it more usable and accessible. After installing, just hit F4 at any time to toggle Contacts Sidebar's visibility in the Thunderbird sidebar. Once visible, you can easily search, edit, or email contacts from the main Thunderbird interface. We'd mentioned Contacts Sidebar once before among 
In the 21st century, the majority of our correspondence takes place digitally, which means easier, faster, and more efficient communication with our contacts. But the proliferation of digital communication also means we're faced with more contacts, email addresses, phone numbers, and instant messaging handles to remember; even more difficult is keeping all of this information up-to-date and available wherever and whenever you need it. Countless contact management solutions are available on the web and for your desktop, but among all that choice, it's difficult to narrow down the best. So for this week's Hive Five, we want you to tell us all about your favourite contact management tool. Hit the jump for more details and to nominate your favorite.
Store all of your online contacts in one place with web application Keepm. If you've run the gamut of popular email applications across the years, chances are you may have lost track of a few contacts along the way. Keepm imports your contacts from popular applications like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, Linked In, as well as from vCards or Outlook. When you need to search for a contact, you can go straight to Keepm and be comfortable knowing that the information you need is there regardless of where you originally created that contact. You can also export your contacts from Keepm at any time as vCards or a CSV file, which means it would at the very least work well to consolidate and export your contacts. Keepm does require you to hand over your username and password on the sites you want to import contacts from, but they do not store your login info on their servers.
