While traditional contact management has focused on integration with Outlook and other business mail systems, many modern users have already moved towards a new method of staying in touch with important contacts. Now, instead of handing out business cards and entering contact information into forms and fields, a business contact will most likely connect with you over a social network such as LinkedIn or Facebook. These modern social networks make it very simple to stay connected to a wide network of contacts without having to maintain data and without having to worry whether a contact's information is correct, since the contacts are maintaining the information on the network. But the component of contact management that these networks lack is management.

However, a new beta product, Nimble Contact, makes it possible to integrate contacts across mail and social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. By utilizing the information and communications in these networks, Nimble Contact provides one of the richest, most dynamic, and accurate contact management tools that we've seen.

Once Nimble Contact has been integrated with a user's social networks, the Social tab of the application provides a unified view into all of the updates and activities of friends and business contacts. Access to other features of Nimble Contact is also available from this section; for example, clicking on the name of a user in an update brings up the person's full contact profile. Now in beta, Nimble Contact says a free version of the application is planned to remain in place even after a paid enterprise version with higher functionality is released.

Recommended Reading:
-- Review: Nimble Makes Swift Work Of Contact Management
-- CES 2011: Nimble's Social Net Works Internally And With Facebook, Twitter, Etc.
-- RockMelt Refreshes Social Browser
-- Review: Firefox 4 Improves Interface, Performance, Privacy Controls
-- Review: Clearvale Express Free Social Networking For Businesses
-- Review: IE 9 Is Microsoft's Best Browser Yet
-- Review: Google Adds Faster Engine To Chrome 10