WriteThat.Name is a real-time platform that updates your personal contacts in your e-mail address book. Requiring virtually no maintenance, you’ll forget it even exists. Whether you are a social media maven with contacts via multiple channels or a real estate agent with hundreds of clients each month, updated contact information is key.
“An average of 8,000 e-mails are analyzed … and among these 8,000, an average of 28% have signatures,” explains Brad Patterson, WriteThat.Name’s Community Manager. That’s a lot of people. It’s tough to find the time and meticulously update e-mail addresses, phone numbers, Skype usernames and Twitter handles for every person you meet. This tool aims to solve this very problem.
After creating and connecting your account, continue your e-mails as you normally do. You can even subscribe with several email addresses to centralize your contacts in one address book. When new people reach out to you or current contacts change emails, WriteThat.Name semantically detects and analyzes their signature and updates your address book accordingly. You’ll even get an email update that Peter from your local real estate company has been added to your contacts list.
For those of you who feel like there’s no way to catch up now, there’s Flashback, a way to scan past e-mails and update your address book. “It was born from the feedback of our users and has been a huge hit, with one out of three users opting for the service within their first month,” says Patterson. A task as huge as this would be a bear for e-mailers to do manually themselves. Since the information is updated overnight, the burden can be lifted.
Rest assured, privacy is priority. According to WriteThat.Name’s policies, no human will ever read your messages. A computer program sifts through to find the signatures. Once analyzed, “the copies are immediately and automatically deleted” and mail is not archived in any way. Even with multiple accounts, you can aggregate your contacts through this platform.
“E-mail isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. There will always been a need for e-mail where messages are written and recorded,” Patterson says. If that’s the case, services like WriteThat.Name help make things more manageable. Until we develop instantaneous telecommunication through rapid advances in quantum entanglement, your best bet is still to keep your friends close and your contacts closer.
Guest author Stephanie Nguyen loves digital storytelling, the data way. Follow her on Twitter @nguyenist.