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[Gregory Miller] is 
[DallasBlue] Thank you for your UNYK invitation. It appears to be an interesting service. A few quick questions follow if you don't mind so I can evaluate it.
[Gregory Miller] You're Welcome, I was hoping that I wasn't going to offend anyone, It is a BETA and I realized it offered very little in the way of true personalization.
[DallasBlue] Regarding my invitation, did you upload your contacts or LinkedIn connections and explicitly tell or authorize UNYK to invite me? If not, why did I receive an invitation?
[Gregory Miller] Yes, I had to upload LinkedIn Connections, The chain of events started when I received an invitation from William Buist, at Abelard (also ecademy.com)
[DallasBlue] Are you actively using UNYK? Is it now your primary repository for contacts? What do you think of it? Is it better than Plaxo, which does the same? Thanks!
[Gregory Miller] For the past few days I have been it TEST mode myself, and I will stay active with it; it may remain FREE to collect a user base, but if it doesn't deliver, I won't abandon it without an exit strategy. There is an Outlook Plug-In, which is advertised as use-it-as-much-as-you like for contact updates, and the service has the option of Permission levels for certain personal information to be classified as confidential, and can be edited on a Per-Contact Basis, this is a commonality with Plaxo.
I immediately saw this as a possible alternative to Plaxo, and an aside may explain my taking this approach. I have had the misfortune of dealing with Plaxo Support, due to confusion, I admit. I created user groups on Plaxo, I joined Clubs on Plaxo, and being used to the formats of LinkedIn, and what until a month ago was the format of ecademy, sorry to say; the thought of being able to replay to fellow members of an interest Group on Plaxo, did not occur to me to have negative implications. This is until several of the members of the same interest groups on Plaxo, who had been messaging about Multi-Level Marketing and other basically unwanted announcements; took it upon themselves to report to the system that although they had in essence "spammed" me several times over, the one message I sent them was purely evil, as they then claimed to not know me. On the Plaxo platform this is an unforgivable sin, I soon found to my implacable frustration that I was BANNED by Plaxo, for spamming, which this in essence was not. I had to submit a half dozen of Plaxo's own auto-generated Support Ticket Request Responders in order to get the simple e-mail reply stating that my case would be undertaken for review. Meanwhile I received all of the requisite Plaxo Premium Service Level Message Alerts, for about a month, and was locked out of their service.
I do not expect them to be human enough to recompense for the lost month.
[Gregory Miller] I cannot make a discernment as to Better Than/Worse Than, per Plaxo, What I have Asked UNYK Support in particular is about the potential for function identical to Plaxo's "De-Duper" – which may exist, I may have overlooked it if UNYK has it, based on the visual elements of their current user interface being unfamiliar to me. I have had a slight issue with their system leaving Invited Contacts which were in fact uploaded duplicates in the Invited Contacts Queue. To resolve, I manually deleted the Contact from the Address Book on the UNYK Account, and then removed the duplicates, which stayed in the queue, unsent until all instances of that same contact were not in the UNYK Address Book.
I have had no programmatic failures of the UNYK plug-in for Microsoft Outlook 2007, however I did have to discover that UNYK during Import from MS Outlook appears to recognize only One Contacts repository. The UNYK system will at this point as far as I understand it, not map further than that, or again I may be ignorant of their folder mapping import design. I COULD BE WRONG.
I should also say that, I am running the Outlook Connector from Microsoft, and this may not have been supported in the UNYK contacts folder mapping, as UNYK is in Beta. What I am hoping is that UNYK supports a larger contacts storage than Plaxo. Plaxo seems to be akin to a server based Symantec ACT! Address book circa 2000-2004; which will become burnt toast if you have more than 10,000 contacts to import or store in those ACT! Versions, dream on, the architecture crashes. Plaxo does the same. Plaxo may be really cool because you see a representation of all of your synced Outlook Contacts folders, but once you have aggregated 10,000 Contacts into Plaxo, I hope you have packed a lunch because it is simply going to alert you to the fact that the address book is full, you have encountered an error and your wait time was a completely wasted effort.
The question also remains in my mind about UNYK performing an online Outlook Calendars folder sync-up, contact folder by contacts folder. Plaxo also does this.
Plaxo adds the caveat that one should sync their Notes field in Outlook as well, preventing time spent reviewing apparent multiplicities of Contacts, which is irksome, even with Plaxo.
If UNYK is able to integrate a-similar folder mapping, calendar mapping and can go over the top of 10,000 Contacts then they in my book will have instantly made Plaxo worthless to me. I am interested in being able to batch my Contacts into a retrievable storage online, and the removable with relative ease of duplicates; and of course the "Killer App" of automatic comparative field updating, or I never would have subscribed to Plaxo. After years of doing updates myself, I have yet to see the Holy Grail.
I use the Outlook Connector because I CAN consolidate, I have to remind myself that Microsoft Office Live Mail accounts as yet still only allow 1,000 total contacts per account so realistically my Contacts live in the Personal Folders on my profile in my *.pst and I have to remind myself to keep the Contacts folders empty for the +/- 20 accounts that I use empty.
I still have to keep the total of Outlook contacts below 10,000 for Plaxo to be useful and not crash. Ironically I seem to be in the middle of yet another effort to perfect the madness of what is supposed to be an electronic Roll-o-dex.
I am also a complete git, and enjoy that I do not have to look at Microsoft Office Live Mail ads. Microsoft Outlook Connector is also still in Beta.
I Also use the LinkedIn Plug-in in Outlook (has the Contact Grabber for e-mail) , the Textual Anagram Contact grabber for non-email format, a mail filtering plug-in for XING, and another Beta Address book tool which is a "Killer App" of a plug-in, The ZIPI (Zoom Info Plug In) from zoominfo.com.
I highly recommend it. It has a comparative & replace function as well for the data fields. ZIPI is also available as an API, and can be placed on a webpage.
If you hybridized UNYK with ZIPI and gave it a base architecture that supported +10,000 entries, and allowed it to sync with Webmail(s), with a Plaxo De-Duper; You are the proprietor of the hottest contact management gadget on earth in my opinion. If it then integrates with the Outlook Business Contact Manager (I run Office Enterprise & am a MS Office Small Business Developer quasi-wack–job that worked on Microsoft Remote Desktop Office & AJAX for MS Outlook Web Access integration with AT&T, Citrix, EDS, XO Communications & Mi8 IT Security before the hardware was distributed to office-less workers from the World Trade Center complex) Then it truly becomes Contacts Holy Grail.
I disagree with Comcast's policy on limiting users' bandwidth and throttling, so when they purchased Plaxo, it gave the cynical side of me yet another reason to look upon the AIM Universal Address book (Plaxo) with disdain for failure to realize its potential; never mind my feeble expectations.
I do not hate Plaxo, my remarks are after all shaded by a negative experience and their failure to improve their basic platform of service towards those who pay for a service, as opposed to those who use it free.
The biggest disappointment I have experienced online this year though was Ecademy, changing their basic free services level; which they had upgraded, retrofitting to a degree what I thought was an excellent model for business social networking, for people like myself; that look for replies, answers and insight. Now people will not see the greater benefit to the increased user levels of Ecademy at all. They cannot walk there now, so what is to aspire them to run, to make running partners, or ever win the race?
They have shot themselves in the foot, I may be wrong, but it may have been cash flow; I have yet to ask Thomas Power why this happened, but, from an enthusiastic Social Networking neophyte – (my female counterpart) and a Ph.D. associate, a wonderful useful tool for living as we do in front of a terminal; became a bent nail.
[Gregory Miller] If I missed anything, or you have any other questions (yes, I'm not sane) or comments, as always FEEL FREE to Ask…. I can try.
[Gregory Miller] & Just so You know --- The DallasBlue Business Network ROCKS!
(if this was a web-mail loaded response it would say: [perl error]
Warmest Replies.
Gregory R. Miller
[DallasBlue]Best Regards,
Marc
_________ The DallasBlue Business Network _____________
Marc Freedman
Founder and Executive Director, The DallasBlue Business Network
http://www.DallasBlue.com
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