T11M

Managing contacts is a pain in the neck to say the very least.  However, with the advent of online social networking sites such as Facebook, it has become much easier to keep up with people’s changes in contact information (provided they update their profiles, of course).  The main problem is easily transferring all of the great data in Facebook to your local computers Address Book, or in my case a few more since I have an iPhone and MobileMe.  The iPhone has some pretty awesome capabilities; from profile/contact pictures to email addresses to IM usernames the iPhone stores it all and gives me immediate access.  MobileMe also stores my info in the “cloud” adding just one more way I can access my complete contact database if for some unconscionable reason I am without both my phone and my laptop (heaven forbid!). 

For quite some time I have tried to go through my Facebook friends and add them to my address book.  I then copy over email address, phone numbers, physical address, IM username, and contact pictures.  However, this got really tedious, really fast.  Until now.  Today I finally found the application that does it all for me.  AddressBookSync is a quick, down-and-dirty application that once you give it access to your facebook profile goes through and compares your Facebook contacts with your Address Book.  The app was written solely by Dan Auclair and I have to give him props!  The app just works and pulls over all of the contact info associated with your friends.  If one of your Facebook friends is not in your Address Book you are given the option to import them as a new contact.  I only ran into one problem.  A couple of my friends names are different on Facebook than they are in my Address Book and it wasn’t able to match these friends up.  The fix is easy enough though.  I just imported them as new contacts and transferred any info that wasn’t on Facebook into their vCard.  Nice work Dan!  Nice work.