General Musing

I’ve been struggling with removing/merging duplicate entries from my address book with a commercially available tool for some time. I could just write one, and I still might. Until then I’ll list the ones I’ve tried and

Plaxo doesn’t de-dup for free, and they have difficulty with an address book which has more than 10000 entries, even though a good part of them are duplicates. An ad

GMail also doesn’t do it very well, I can download my address book and upload it again and have it add most of the enrties for a second time.

LinkedIn is much worse as a storage place, as it ignores all the users who I am not connected to on LinkedIn. And I have too many connections who have populated important fields, such as Name or Title with SEO data or mail addresses.

There are a number of simple commercial script which should do what I need, but I expect that it’s little better than the scripts I’ve written to do a contact merge.

Finally Wakoopa advised me to have a look at Apple‘s MobileMe, although yesterday I was getting the following message:

So I guess I’ll have a look at it tomorrow.

Any other suggestions?

Technorati Tags: crm, dedup, duplicate, gmail, linkedin, mail, plaxo, wakoopa