A new Post "WhitePages aims to clean up your address book with Hiya" was written on the March 10, 2011 at 12:00 pm on "Press Release – Buzz Issue.".

Seattle company WhitePages has built up a massive database of contact
information for people and businesses --- it supposedly has more than
200 million listings. Now WhitePges wants to use its technology to
clean up your address book with an iPhone and Web application called
Hiya.

This is something that a lot of people struggle with, according to
Harris Interactive survey commissioned by WhitePages. The survey found
that 20 percent of adults in the United States think their address
book is messy, incomplete, or out-of-date, and 50 percent say that
they have duplicate contacts. Hiya allows users to merge duplicate
contacts and to ask their friends for more up-to-date information.

There are other contact management solutions out there, acknowledged
Hiya senior product manager Amanda Bishop --- in fact, things may be
getting more competitive as Comcast-owned social networking service
Plaxo plans to relaunch its product in a way that refocuses on its
original goal, managing users’ address books. But Bishop said that
Hiya brings a number of WhitePages’ technology advantages to the
problem.

Most importantly, she said Hiya does the best job of actually spotting
duplicate contacts. For example, when she tried to merge duplicates in
the same list of contacts in both Hiya and Google Contacts, Hiya
spotted a number of duplicates that Google didn’t (usually when one
of the entries was incomplete or misspelled).

Another cool feature allows you to ask your contacts to provide
missing information --- for example if you only have someone’s email
address and want their phone number as well. This still works if your
contact isn’t a Hiya member. They’ll just get an email with a
link, then they can submit information on the Hiya website without
registering themselves.

Other features include the ability to see which contacts are in or
near a new city when you’re traveling, and to fine-tune the
synchronization between your different address books. You can fully
synchronize your iPhone, Google, and Hiya address books, or only
synchronize them one way (so that changes in Hiya aren’t
automatically pushed to your other address books), or not synchronize
them at all.

Of course, you can also pull contact data from WhitePages, and
you’ll receive notifications when WhitePages updates the listing for
one of your contacts. (None of your private contact data will get
shared with WhitePages, Bishop said.)

The Hiya service started its private beta test last October, and is
now entering the public beta phase. Outlook, Android, and BlackBerry
versions are in the works. There’s no immediate pressure to make
money from the app, Bishop said --- it’s free for now, and while the
company will consider adding premium features that users have to pay
for later, it’s also looking at other revenue options.

Tags: address books, contact management, Hiya

Companies: WhitePages

People: Amanda Bishop

See the original post:
WhitePages aims to clean up your address book with Hiya

http://www.buzz-issue.com/2011/03/whitepages-aims-to-clean-up-your-ad...

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