I recently did a little digging to find third-party apps for managing your address book that were better than Apple’s default Contacts app.

There aren’t any. At least, none that I found were worth using for more than a day (or even installing on my iPhone to begin with). And even the process of letting others have access to your contacts feels troubling, because you have no idea what other companies are doing with the information you provide.

Keeping your address book up to date is always a tasking process. While a few apps exist that supposedly comb your contacts for updates, those only work if they actually update their information. Tech blog Digital Inspiration has come up with a simple Google Script that you send to contacts so they can update their information themselves.

Free Chrome and Firefox extension CloudMagic now indexes content from Gmail, Google Docs and Google Contacts for offline searching within the browser.

Your contacts are often scattered across multiple email accounts and social sites. Here's how to seamlessly combine them all by using Google Contacts as your unified address book.

A new feature in Google's Picasa image management application, which is incredibly good at identifying faces, allows you to set Google Contacts photos for every contact you have a picture of in a couple clicks.

If you've ever wanted to consolidate all your contacts — from Google Contacts, Facebook, LinkedIn, your desktop address book and your phone — into one comprehensive bucket you can effortlessly sync and export anywhere, then you've come to the right place.

Google Apps users and those looking for a central, convenient spot for their contacts, take note: Google's stand-alone contacts site now lets anyone with a Google account add and manage names and details.