Recommendations for Contact Management?

[jducoeur]

Having had my first major networking foray, I find myself in need of some way of keeping track of the people I've just met. Anybody have any suggestions of good software for this? I have little desire to use Exchange, for a variety of reasons. I'd frankly prefer something online, so I don't have to worry about having my contact list be dependent on the vagaries of a single hard drive, so long as the site I host it on is halfway trustworthy. I might just use Gmail, but I haven't tried to do anything *serious* with that, so I don't know if there are particular strengths or weaknesses there.

So -- anybody have any favorites? I'm especially interested in advice from consultants and suchlike, who need to juggle significant and constantly growing lists of contacts in a manageable way...

Comments

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

I would use Gmail, without hesitation.

If you got a lot of Twitter handles from folks, you might benefit from subscribing to their feeds.

[jducoeur]

I got a few, and I'll probably do so in a couple of cases. But that's going to be necessarily reserved for people I'm a little more substantially interested in paying attention to on a regular basis. The issue right now is mainly the fringier contacts -- the ones who I might want to look up in two months, based on my vague recollections of having met them...

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

Where I used to work, the community organizers used Twitter quite a bit for organizing events, etc. A couple folks in our organization created separate Twitter RSS feeds just for their "casual contacts" so that if they knew they were going to have a meeting with that person, they could review their Twitters and get a snapshot of recent activity. I think they also used it as a way to sort out current meetings, events, etc that community members might be interested in (sort of a "who's running what" archive. In a bit more of a tech-savvy community, I can see it being used as a way to "bone up" on a meeting with a contact prior to that meeting.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Just on a flyer, I googled "farley file", and I got a few interesting results. This one looks promising: http://www.farleyfile.net/. But really, I didn't look much farther, so you might want to search that for yourself.

[jducoeur]

Huh -- not being as much of a Heinlein buff, I wouldn't have thought of that; thanks! Looks like it has potential, but it's just potential at this point: the site seems to imply that it's nearing private beta. But it also implies that it's been in that state for months so far, and "nearing private beta" really isn't good enough for serious day-to-day use. So that has to get filed under the "possibly interesting later" category...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I have been playing with HighRise, from 37signals. It's...halfway there. Free trial for your-sized needs.

Writing a better CMS is my Current Secret Project. I'd love to talk to you about what you need in one.

[jducoeur]

At this point, I simply don't *know* what I need in one. I have a suspicion that in a year I'll be full of opinions, but I haven't learned the painful lessons yet...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Heh. And now I just dumped HighRise, too, and went back to my Excel spreadsheet. (Tried to load in a bunch of new contacts for a conference this week. Its fields are orthogonal to my needs. FAIL.)

[jducoeur]

Here's one idea of what I'd like in such a system, offhand from today's experience: arbitrary tags. Searching would also be lovely, obviously, but the ability to impose my own structure on the data would make me Very Happy. Closest Gmail seems to come to this is putting people into Groups, but that doesn't really have the right connotations...

[redsquirrel.livejournal.com]

Some kind of sales management software? Because really, sales is all about contacts. I'm not really conversant with what's out there but my sister's in the business of selling market research services to investment fund managers - pretty high powered stuff - and uses that sort of program all the time.

[jducoeur]

A good point -- I suspect Salesforce would handle this magnificently. (In fact, I'm sure of it: I know Salesforce pretty well.) But that costs real money, which I'm trying to avoid spending right at this point...

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Conventional paper address books are wonderful things, or even just a book of blank paper. They don't die if the computer crashes and you can arrange people in whatever way you like including things you'd never be able to get a computer to do.

[jducoeur]

Heh -- a good point. OTOH, paper address books kind of suck in terms of easy searchability through large numbers of contacts, and aren't generally on my person, so I can't use them as readily if I'm away from the "office". So online tools do potentially have *some* advantages.

(I suppose I can use that as a good criterion for evaluating tools, though: "Does this tool do anything that I can't do more easily with pen and paper?" I suspect at least some would fail that test.)