Not So Relevant

Combining Address Book and Lifestreams

While looking for the perfect online address book I have stumbled across Tabber a few weeks ago. Tabber is a fairly new startup which gives online address books some kind of new twist by providing lifestreams. Although I am using Plaxo more regularly now I think it is always good to check out some alternatives.

Address Book

Though first it is an address book, of course. As you can see on the left you can add all necessary information for your contacts; if you care you can also tag each contact. Contacts can be imported from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Digg, MySpace as well as from instant messengers (MSN, AIM, Yahoo). If you add their date of birth you will be notified in the sidebar of Tabber. Though I wish those birthday notifications were separated from Tabber product notifications because they could be overlooked easily. Another feature which is similar to Plaxo is merging contacts. Once your contacts also join Tabber, you will notified about changes they make to their public profile which definitely helps keeping your address book up-to-date.

Lifestreams

Although Plaxo has added some basic lifestreaming feature - Pulse - to its new beta, Tabber’s implementation is more useful. Besides some pre-defined accounts (Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, MySpace) you can add every RSS feed you like and it will show as a lifestream on your profile. But that’s not all; you can also add feeds to your contacts’ profiles. So if you click on the Recent Activity tab when viewing the list of your contacts you can see all their lifestreams on just one page. That’s pretty cool, I think and adds more value to your address book.

Conclusion

Tabber offers some very useful features for managing your contacts. Lifestreams are definitely a bonus and help keeping you in the loop with your contacts and their social online life. There is also a Facebook app available which adds your Tabber feed to Facebook. Visually Tabber is not really appealing; it looks rather boring with mostly grey and white background colours and black and blue text. But that should not distract you from checking it out.

Though I really don’t like the lack of any contact information for Tabber; there is a blog but the About page is empty and there is an email address in the privacy statement; no postal address and/or phone number. Also the privacy statement has probably been copied from somewhere else because I think it doesn’t always relate to Tabber and its features. That’s rather disappointing considering that Tabber might store users’ passwords when they import their address books from Gmail or other sources.

I guess I will stay with Plaxo at the moment. Tabber is certainly an application to watch, especially if it adds some more and concrete contact and privacy information.

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