Sunday, January 20, 2013

Product review: Contactually - email and contact management

I have been using Contactually for a month now and would highly recommend it. It is a contact management system which integrates with Gmail and helps you keep in touch with personal and professional network.

Initial set up is easy, but takes up time as it integrates with Gmail / LinkedIn accounts. Once it fetches your contacts, you need to create buckets for contacts such as friends, family, colleagues etc. The bucketing process is manual and can be cumbersome. Good thing developers have tried to gamify the process by creating the 'Bucket game'.

Once the set up is complete, you will receive a daily alert with people to reach out today. You can set up frequency of alerts for contact buckets, for e.g. you want to contact your family members every 14 days, and your referrals every 2 months. You can set up your weekly target of contacts to reach out to.

Bucket game needs to improve - contacts should be prioritized in a better way based on communication history.

I love the product - it is an easy way to keep in touch with your contacts. With the email and communication clutter, this can be a great tool to 'actively' manage your network.

2 comments:

Arjun said...

nice one Pango!
All our messaging, social apps are geared towards giving us excuses and reasons to reach out to our friends and contacts. Making a game out of it or ensuring you are keeping in touch with everyone sounds interesting - though I'm not sure if there may be better ways to help initiating conversations with these contacts based on context.

pango said...

Contextual suggestions will be good - but then we will have to give them 'reading' permissions. Facebook might be in a much better position to do it.