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Ask Engadget: best online rolodex?
We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadget inquiry is coming to us from Ellio, who needs to control his wayward address book with something a little more useful than Gmail. If you're looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com. "Hi there. I love Ask Engadget and I've got a problem I hope you can help with. I run my own business and deal with thousands of contacts on a regular basis. I need a more efficient way of cataloging their contact details than Gmail contacts or my OS X address book -- since I'd like to be able to tag-search for people who work for the same company or in the same industry. Friends have suggested using a spreadsheet, but I'm sure someone's invented a more efficient method than that, so any pointers you can give would be amazing, thanks!" With a small army of contacts we have to marshall on a regular basis, we feel your pain Ellio. We've heard some things about Flexadex, but many of our staffers just muddle on through with Gmail. That's why we'll open the floor to our beautiful and clever commenters to find out what they use on a regular basis.
Google code reveals inner Circles, a social secret weapon?
Nothing livens the day like a blurry screen grab of some Javascript, especially when it hints at the ghostly form of a social networking tool that doesn't officially exist. The code was spotted hiding in plain sight at Google Profiles by Austrian blogger Florian Rohrweck, who fortunately enjoys browsing computer-speak more than playing in the park. Rohrweck noticed the word "circles" used repeatedly in the context of people adding and maintaining groups of contacts, and made the connection to the Google Circles social networking platform that was feverishly rumored and then vehemently denied earlier this year (a saga fully recapped at the More Coverage link). It's impossible to know whether these few lines of code represent a forthcoming service, another social layer on top of existing services, or just pure experimentation on the part of Google devs. In any case, the circular references have apparently now been zapped, leaving us with nothing more than that screen grab -- oh yeah, and Facebook.
