Rolodex 2.0 - the social web is becoming our address book

Remember when we (meaning those of us 40+ years old) had those red moleskin diaries and notebooks with the names, addresses and phone numbers of all our friends and other contacts?  Remember when we had those impressive Rolodexes on our desks, with thousands of business cards in them? When 'having a huge Rolodex' meant having a lot of power? When we painstakingly scanned those 1000s of business cards we garnered at conferences and tradeshows so that we could load them into our databases, or maybe add them to our eMail news list? Remember when we had those crucially important mobile phone numbers in our phone's memory (or on the SIM card) only? When Outlook had all our email contacts? When having a computer hard-disc crash or a stolen machine meant that many of our contact details were lost forever because we were always sloppy with our back-ups?

Well, no more: all of this is quickly becoming the past, for these reasons:

• Everyone that I meet face-to-face is sooner or later added to at least one of my social networks (that is, if I actually enjoyed meeting them, of course), freeing me from the onerous task of having to manually keep track how exactly I met them. For me, LinkedIn has in effect become my electronic rolodex, and finding, retrieving and filtering people has become very simple. I constantly use LinkedIn to keep track of people that I have met, and to re-connect with them as needed - and I keep LinkedIn pretty much reserved for people I have met in the 'meat-space'  rather than just online.  The bottom line is that just like GMail has greatly simplified searching through your emails, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are simplifying my people search; by far beating the traditional methods of keeping my contacts up-to-date.
• Everyone that emails me (or vice versa) is saved in my gMail contacts list - all I need to do is search (and yes, I do export my contact list regularly). Why would I export lists of addresses if I can always search for them? Why do I need Plaxo or iContact if I have GMail plus my social networks (and now, realtime search and Friendfeed streams?
• Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook keep very good track of my current conversations and make it easy to see my most active network members, so if I need to find someone I can certainly do it here very quickly
• Google private bookmarking tools and Yahoo's Delicious (which I keep public) make it very easy to bookmark and annotate people that are relevant to me, for later retrieval. I do this with 1000s of people I have met - I quickly bookmark your profile and add a few keywords, and even if I totally forget about anyone I will still be able to find them 5 years from now.
• Apple's slick MobileMe keeps track of my datebook, my contacts and my files; and on all my Macs and iPhones and iPods

So are we becoming dependent on these new contact platforms? I guess so - but maybe it's better than looking stuff up the way we used to, anyway...?  You tell me.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 12 Mobile Cloud Sync Solutions Measured (readwriteweb.com)

Comments

[Piers]

I totally agree with you, and if you really want to get the most out of Facebook go through all your friends (I know that the more you have the harder it is) and put everyone into categories, this makes things just that much easier when trying to find someone!

But other then that I'm glad that I have grown up at a time where I never needed to keep track of business cards or have a Rolodex,

Welcome to the Digital Age!