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When I first started my career, I was keenly interested in networking and keeping up professional relationships. I sent holiday cards to all my former bosses and swapped emails with my favorite college professors, just to stay in touch. Collecting business cards and entering their information into my email address book was more hobby than chore. Since then, new tools and platforms have revolutionized contact management. Business email, personal email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter let us connect in new ways and for different purposes. Mobile devices have changed when and where we communicate, as well as what we say.
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Xobni Corporation has been one of the more interesting players in the contact management space, indentifying where there needs to be more intersection between all the gadgets and apps we use. Smartr Contacts for Android (free), formerly called Xobni for Android, creates a comprehensive picture of your contacts. Xobni is the company that makes the app, and it has been a relatively big name in contact management. The free app, which requires a Xobni account (also free) gathers your contacts from Gmail or Outlook, and finds additional information about them, including headshots, from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and meetings or text messages. Smartr Contacts also orders your connections by how often you communicate, rather than alphabetically, so the people you email most are always at the top and within easy reach. The app handily merges multiple emails for a single person into one entry, so if you have an outdated email address for someone, but she has uploaded the most recent one to another platform, Smartr can find it. Smartr Contacts won't delete old email addresses, but will add the new information when it's available.
Although I hit a few inconsistencies and had a lot of trouble logging back into the app once I had logged out, while it was up and running, Smartr for Android provides a lot of information about the people you know and how you communicate with them, succinctly and quickly.
System Requirements and Set UpSmartr Contacts for Android requires an Android phone running OS 2.1 or later. It also requires access to at least one of your accounts where you store contact information, preferably Gmail. To get the most out of the app, you'll also have to grant the app access to your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts.
Setting up the free app takes very little time; it walks you through the process in a minute or two. You'll be asked to create a Xobni account, and to authenticate other accounts you have (i.e., social networks) to let them and Smartr interact. As mentioned, I had some trouble logging back into Xobni after I had logged out, which I did by force—Smartr for Android always left me logged in by default. The reason I had logged out was to try and connect a second Facebook account, which I couldn't do upon set up, nor afterward from a settings page within the app. While you can't have more than one Facebook account, you can have multiple Gmail accounts.
FeaturesWhen you log into Xobni and launch the Smartr Contacts app, a home screen greets you with picture of people you know and a search bar front and center. Type anything in to the search bar—the first few letters of a first or last name, a company name—and Smartr will quickly grab some results. On the results page, the text you searched appears highlighted in the results.
Smartr Contacts shows its wits best once you select a contact. Each person has a page that shows:
details (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.),
social presence (the last update, or general information, from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter),
history (a bar chart showing frequency of communication with the person over time, and a list of recent exchanges), and
common (other people who are often included on an email thread).
The history feature is a boon for professional networking. If you come across a contact you haven't spoken to in a while, it shows you exactly where you left off by listing the most recent communication directly below. It shows a clear synopsis of your relationship with the person.
If Smartr doesn't have an entry for a person in a particular social network, it leaves it blank, which is where I found some inconsistencies in the app. One person who is clearly connected with me on LinkedIn (as evidenced by the LinkedIn icon on his main headshot in the app) had no profile listing for LinkedIn. You always have the option to edit a contact, change the name, add email addresses and more phone numbers, if what's showing isn't complete, although you can't easily add them to a social network. For the person whose LinkedIn information was missing, I wanted Smartr to try and connect me to him in LinkedIn, hoping that once the app arrived at that network, it would see that we already were connected and perhaps fix the problem. But the app doesn't offer this function.
Click on a person's Facebook information, and when that app opens (still within the framework of Smartr), it shows the common connections you have with that person.
Smartr ResultsSmartr Contacts for Android works fast, finds people using intuitive search words, and becomes more useful the more you use it. But I ultimately see it as an all-of-nothing adoption. It's not the kind of app for dabblers. If you use your Android phone heavily for sending and receiving email, booking appointments, and generally doing business, whether it's professional business or personal, Smartr can offer a lot of information that you'll be happy to leverage.
More
Xobni Corporation has been one of the more interesting players in the contact management space, indentifying where there needs to be more intersection between all the gadgets and apps we use. Smartr Contacts for Android (free), formerly called Xobni for Android, creates a comprehensive picture of your contacts. Xobni is the company that makes the app, and it has been a relatively big name in contact management. The free app, which requires a Xobni account (also free) gathers your contacts from Gmail or Outlook, and finds additional information about them, including headshots, from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and meetings or text messages. Smartr Contacts also orders your connections by how often you communicate, rather than alphabetically, so the people you email most are always at the top and within easy reach. The app handily merges multiple emails for a single person into one entry, so if you have an outdated email address for someone, but she has uploaded the most recent one to another platform, Smartr can find it. Smartr Contacts won't delete old email addresses, but will add the new information when it's available.
Although I hit a few inconsistencies and had a lot of trouble logging back into the app once I had logged out, while it was up and running, Smartr for Android provides a lot of information about the people you know and how you communicate with them, succinctly and quickly.
System Requirements and Set UpSmartr Contacts for Android requires an Android phone running OS 2.1 or later. It also requires access to at least one of your accounts where you store contact information, preferably Gmail. To get the most out of the app, you'll also have to grant the app access to your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts.
Setting up the free app takes very little time; it walks you through the process in a minute or two. You'll be asked to create a Xobni account, and to authenticate other accounts you have (i.e., social networks) to let them and Smartr interact. As mentioned, I had some trouble logging back into Xobni after I had logged out, which I did by force—Smartr for Android always left me logged in by default. The reason I had logged out was to try and connect a second Facebook account, which I couldn't do upon set up, nor afterward from a settings page within the app. While you can't have more than one Facebook account, you can have multiple Gmail accounts.
FeaturesWhen you log into Xobni and launch the Smartr Contacts app, a home screen greets you with picture of people you know and a search bar front and center. Type anything in to the search bar—the first few letters of a first or last name, a company name—and Smartr will quickly grab some results. On the results page, the text you searched appears highlighted in the results.
Smartr Contacts shows its wits best once you select a contact. Each person has a page that shows:
details (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.),
social presence (the last update, or general information, from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter),
history (a bar chart showing frequency of communication with the person over time, and a list of recent exchanges), and
common (other people who are often included on an email thread).
The history feature is a boon for professional networking. If you come across a contact you haven't spoken to in a while, it shows you exactly where you left off by listing the most recent communication directly below. It shows a clear synopsis of your relationship with the person.
If Smartr doesn't have an entry for a person in a particular social network, it leaves it blank, which is where I found some inconsistencies in the app. One person who is clearly connected with me on LinkedIn (as evidenced by the LinkedIn icon on his main headshot in the app) had no profile listing for LinkedIn. You always have the option to edit a contact, change the name, add email addresses and more phone numbers, if what's showing isn't complete, although you can't easily add them to a social network. For the person whose LinkedIn information was missing, I wanted Smartr to try and connect me to him in LinkedIn, hoping that once the app arrived at that network, it would see that we already were connected and perhaps fix the problem. But the app doesn't offer this function.
Click on a person's Facebook information, and when that app opens (still within the framework of Smartr), it shows the common connections you have with that person.
Smartr ResultsSmartr Contacts for Android works fast, finds people using intuitive search words, and becomes more useful the more you use it. But I ultimately see it as an all-of-nothing adoption. It's not the kind of app for dabblers. If you use your Android phone heavily for sending and receiving email, booking appointments, and generally doing business, whether it's professional business or personal, Smartr can offer a lot of information that you'll be happy to leverage.
