ReadWriteWeb

"From paper cards to email contacts." This is Part Two of a two-part post. The first part is here.

As noted earlier, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test this past week at the DEMO conference. While I found a somewhat workable solution for sending out my contact info to others, I still collected a large stack of paper business cards from the people I met. These cards had to be digitized in order for them to be of any use to me. While people with administrative assistants are fortunate to have this tiresome data entry process handled for them, those of us without are stuck doing it ourselves. We can either sit at the keyboard for hours or use a scanner. Shouldn't there be a better way?

Freshly launched contact-amplifying service Zentact aims to solve one of the most enduring problems almost everyone faces in using the internet. We meet people, we intend to stay in touch, but we quickly forget and social connections go cold. This service lets you tag your contacts and then unobtrusively gives you an opportunity to send them an email any time you visit a web page that's related to their interests.

Zentact is the latest would-be blockbuster co-founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the key players behind the Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog and the social media ping server Gnip. We really like this new service a lot and if some of the wrinkles get worked out we expect it to be a mainstay in our everyday use of the web. An invite link to the service is below.

Zimbra is looking to expand its platform to the iPhone. Recently they announced Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0. Zimbra Mobile for iPhone 2.0 will allow iPhone users over-the-air two-way synchronization of e-mails, calendar, contacts, and photos between user mailboxes and mobile devices, and seamless "push" e-mail service for all Zimbra Collaboration Suite users.

What are the number one problems facing today's social networks? According to the young developer Vladislav Chernyshov they are: privacy issues, distraction and time-wasting, quantity over quality, ads, and lack of control over your identity. That's why he, Dmitry Gorpinchenko, and Andrew Chernyh, all students at Novosibirsk State Technical University (NSTU) in Russia, have founded Genome, an upcoming next-generation social networking service which addresses the main problem of Web 2.0: the ever-increasing quantity of Web 2.0 resources and the lack of tools to manage them.

Yahoo! today becomes the latest web BigCo to offer an API allowing developers to gain access to users' address books. Though the Address Book API was publicly launched today, it has already been in use at a handful of large partner sites, including LinkedIn and Plaxo. Charles Wu, the product manager for the Address Book platform, offered a number of use cases for the new API on the YDN blog this morning.

What's the most in-demand API on the web that hasn't existed until today? Wether they knew it or not, millions of people online have thought to themselves "why is this new site I'm on asking me for my Gmail username and password? When will there be a secure API for me to pass those contacts allong without giving up my password?"

That day has come. The Google Contacts API went live tonight and it enables far more than just contact transfer.