If you’re like almost everyone I know, managing your social networking “whirl” is getting harder and harder. This problem comes from one simple issue: Almost all of the services are disconnected from each other.
Sure, some social services allow the use of techniques such as OpenID or OAuth from another service to verify logon identities while others, the excellent ping.fm comes to mind, provide functions such as aggregated posting to groups of social services which is really only integrating outbound posting.
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Even so, these are all useful extensions to your social networking experience but what’s missing is the overview, a way of seeing what your own social universe looks like and managing events within it. And guess what? I’ve got just the answer to your problem …
Connected is a new service that describes itself as “social CRM”. Claiming some 7 million contacts under their management the service provides pretty much the kind of social media stream aggregation and management I’ve been looking for.
For example, on your Contacts page on the Connected, you’ll see a list of all of the people you know from all of the social networking services you’ve told Connected about. It lists their names, company, location, when you last had a conversation (more accurately, that’s any kind of interaction, for example, a retweet on Twitter is treated as a conversation), and the source (social media services) that you connect with them through.
You can tag contacts (work, family, friends, owes me money, etc.) and “star” important people. You can merge entries where you know two aliases belong to an individual and Connected will even look for possible merge candidates.
Besides the Contacts view, there’s the Companies view so you can drill down via the company to see all of the company members you know. You can add notes to companies and, when you select a single contact (whether via the Company view or the Contacts view), you can add notes and browse their latest social network interactions including postings, tweets, photos, and status updates. Connected also shows you which other contacts you have in common as well as the contact’s background details extracted from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
A contact’s page also allows you to send a message by either email or via their Facebook wall and set a reminder so that you can follow up with them (reminders are too simple at present though … they really need to be notes so you know what you’re being reminded of and you need to be able to set recurrent reminders). There’s also support for adding custom fields to contact records for whatever purposes you might have.
Currently, Connected supports integration with Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, LinkedIn CSV, Outlook Contacts CSV, Mac Address Book vCard, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Voice, and Evernote.
Connected also offers “Apps” (which mostly aren’t actually apps in the normal sense but rather services that build on Connected’s functionality) that include Connected Daily (an email update sent to your primary email account that summarizes changes in contact details, warns of birthdays, flags new conversations, and so on); a Gmail sidebar (rather like Rapportive … although I couldn’t get the bookmarklet that executes this to work under Firefox); a mobile version of their site (this really needs to become a true app for both Android and iOS); and several reports such as an interaction summary and a map of all of your contacts with discernable locations.
Pricing for Connected is either $9.99 per month or billed $99.99 per year (12 months for the price of 10).
Obviously the service is still undergoing some core functional development (some features such as managing tabs are not available yet and an API would be a great idea) but there’s no doubt that just as it is, Connected is very powerful. It is also definitely worth checking out to see if it can lighten your social load.
