Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#51

Post by al_borland »

I just use Apple’s Contacts app. I’ve been using it since 2003 (it was called Address Book on OS X back then).

21 years ago I used it with Apple’s iSync to sync contacts with my flip phone. Later with my iPhone.

I have some lists set up to sort out family, work, etc. I just looked and this can _finally_ be done on iOS as well. It was a Mac-only feature for far too long.

Inside the Apple ecosystem everything assumes use of the Contacts app, so I’ve never really had to think about using anything else. Back when AIM was a thing, I could use Address Book to add people’s screen names and they’d show up in iChat (AIM is dead, but I still have their old screen names in my Contacts app). It supports adding social profiles, URLs, and creating relationships. I can add their birthdays and they show up in the Calendar. It’s always been pretty seamless and hasn’t left me wanting. It’s been pretty nice, but I wouldn’t call myself a heavy user.

At work I don’t manage contacts. We have Outlook with Exchange and I just use the directory of everyone to send the occasional email. LinkedIn is just LinkedIn; I rarely look at it.

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#53

Post by kstrauser »

RyanHaraki wrote: post #10

I use Clay ( https://clay.earth/ ) but haven't used it much as I found the search was lacking (my primary use case is searching for contacts that fulfill X criteria)

Whoa, that looks like exactly what I’ve wanted for ages, especially the free part which totally covers my uses.

There are other “personal CRMs” around, but many starting at way more per month/year than I’m willing to budget for such a thing.

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#54

Post by westcort »

enasterosophes wrote: post #38
westcort wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding a text file. I keep addresses this way, too. So does my father. So did my grandfather. I have their files, as well.

Do you mind if I ask what format you've settled on? Having a system evolve over multiple generations means you must have pruned out all the bad ways to do it. I've got this vision of a Neal Stephenson story which will never be written about a family in the 22nd century that has kept all their personal contacts in Git for over 100 years ...

Grandpa was an early adopter of computers due to his work in cryptography, which started even before WWII. He wrote his files mostly in WordStar, and a few other formats that are still readable. Most of these are on a drive and on 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy disks. Dad uses KEDIT, and now Notepad++, probably because KEDIT was popular in Princeton at the time. I think John McPhee still uses KEDIT. I use plain text files and HTML.

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#55

Post by westcort »

froggerexpert wrote: post #44
enasterosophes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind if I ask what format you've settled on? Having a system evolve over multiple generations means you must have pruned out all the bad ways to do it. I've got this vision of a Neal Stephenson story which will never be written about a family in the 22nd century that has kept all their personal contacts in Git for over 100 years ...

Consider https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/ Plain text, but with querying, and likely exporters/importers into calendars.

Thank you! This is interesting!

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#56

Post by taholder »

Our product https://contactzlila.com is a b2b solution providing team based CardDAV. It's perhaps not quite whay you're looking for but we have a new version coming early 2025 which should tick all the boxes. Feel free to sign up for a free trial now and drop me a line if you have any questions! Google luck in your Contact organization journey!

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#58

Post by amerkhalid »

LinuxBender wrote: post #9

I can not speak for others or the consensus but since the 90's I have always just used a plain text file with simple delimiters in a format that I understand so that I can massage the output format to match whatever needs the information. This has worked great for me and is simple to back up and newer versions make this easy to get a good compression ratio of a single tarball of every version . Multiple files as many…

Nothing beats plaintext format. I use Google Sheets but download it locally as csv every year or so.

Re: Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

#59

Post by palata »

troad wrote: post #37
kyletns wrote: post #20

I use Fastmail which has CardDAV syncing, and generally it's worked great. One or twice I've noticed it stops syncing and I have to remove + re-add the sync profile, but generally speaking I've been pretty happy with the results.

I second Fastmail. The interface is very solid, and it syncs very well to my iPhone (I've not had any syncing issues myself). They also have great (human) support, which I find important when it comes to backbone services like email, calendar, and contacts.

Same but with Migadu. I handle the CardDAV from Thunderbird and from Android, it just works.
Post reply on HN