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Soocial the Solution to Syncing Contacts Across Your Blackberry, Gmail, and Outlook?

If you have a Blackberry, and you are a Entourage user, and you use Gmail, it’s pretty much impossible to sync your contacts across those three locations.  I’ve spent way too much time trying to find a way to do this.  In my searching, I recently discovered Soocial.  The most impressive thing about Soocial is that someone finally figured out that there is a need for this type of syncronization.

Soocial is in Beta, and there is no lack of warnings letting you know that you may lose a bunch of data by using the service.  This is one of the more negative aspects of the service, I was so scared by the warnings, that I used an alternative Gmail account I have to test the service out.  I didn’t have any issues though, so I’m guessing all of the warnings are mostly to cover Soocial just in case.

I set it up to sync between my Mac address book, and Gmail.  Blackberry support isn’t available yet, so I couldn’t test that out, but it is coming very soon apparently.  But I also don’t need that, since I sync with Gmail through GoogleSync.  There is support for Outlook, but unfortunately not for Entourage.  I would like to see that, as that’s my ultimate challenge.  But it appears that the Soocial folks plan on adding a number of platforms to the list.  Highrise is an option, and supposedly LinkedIn and several others are coming.

The online interface itself is very basic, and doesn’t support categorization, which was somewhat dissappointing, and made it difficult to scan through the hundreds of contacts I had.  However, it looks like Soocial has the right idea, and just needs to dress it up a bit and add a bit more integration.  It has been compared to Plaxo, which I don’t think does it justice.  Plaxo seems to have alterior motives and purposes, whereas Soocial simply seems to be a tool focused on fulfilling a need that has arisen for those of us utilizing many different devices and networks for communication.

Tags: Address Book, Blackberry, contact managment, contact sync, Gmail, Highrise, sync