It just got even easier to find out information about the people and companies you email, without leaving your inbox to creep on their Facebook pages. FullContact, a Google Chrome plugin, updates your address book to show profile information and photographs from the other sites your contact uses, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Etsy, Pinterest, and Klout.
You can also add personal notes or tags, an invaluable tool for helping you remember the details of the countless clients, companies, and co-workers with whom you correspond. What’s more, FullContact can also unify information from contacts you keep in multiple different email addresses, can merge duplications in your address book, and can automatically correct formatting errors.
Free for a time
FullContact is a free service until you exceed 5,000 contacts, then you’ll need to upgrade to a premium account. The plugin still has a few bugs to work out, with users complaining that FullContact isn’t compatible with Google’s new pop-up compose window, that it sometimes features the wrong profile information, or puts less important information on the top, and that it confuses people’s personal profiles with their business profiles.
Some users have given up on FullContact, saying that the working alternative, Rapportive, has already perfected what FullContact is stumbling to achieve.
However, representatives from Google say that they are making at least one update to the plugin per day, so slowly but surely they are responding to user complaints and improving FullContact’s functioning. They are adding an “improve this data” feature that allows users to manually correct misinformation in their contacts’ profiles. Also in the works is a FullContact app for iPhone.
Who needs FullContact
If you find yourself emailing hundreds of people per week and struggling to remember who they all are, FullContact could be a great tool for keeping you up-to-date with each contact you email.
This story was originally featured in April of 2015.
