New Years Resolution
I never really make them. But I do like to do things each New Years. One is reformat all my computers and reinstall everything. A nice clean start. I also like to clean the hard to reach places in my apartment, like take the refrigerator out and clean in the dark abyss back there. Also change the batteries in the smoke detector, you get the idea.
One thing I do along with the reformat of the hard drives is clean up Outlook. I archive ootles of mail and go through my contacts and try to keep them in order. I always have a few friends who have like 3 or 4 entries in my contacts because they have a work mail, pop, and hotmail/yahoo. I had well over 500 contacts in my contact folder in Outlook. I have no idea how up to date it is, I know in 2003, I moved twice and had 4 different mailing addresses. I am also one of those annoying people who have a work email, personal pop email and a hotmail account (which is basically a porn only account). So I must be causing others problems, how many of my contacts are the same.
So I ran a cool tool that I have been playing with for a while called Plaxo. It is basically a free tool that allows you to mass email your whole contact list and have people verify their data over the web. It works cool and they don’t spam you, I have been a member of Plaxo for months. Your contacts don’t have to even join, just verify on a web form their info is correct. Of course as my pal Conor says “You give me control over my own Contact record, watch out, evil things may happen!!!”.
After I ran it, many people had changed information, or gave me more info than I had before. Also lots of old friends saw me in their inbox and emailed to say hi. I also got 36 bounces that I have to track down the owners through other means. All in all, a great experience.
How does Plaxo make money? Beats the hell out of me. I do hope that they stay around tho, I want to run this again next year.
So check out Plaxo if you have the time.