Zentact Blog

This past week,  we quietly pushed several new features and our latest extension.  If you are on our private beta, we are sure you will like these.

New features include:

• More robust contact information including LinkedIn, Blogs, RSS, Flickr and Delicious
• Automagical population of data - we have added Twitter handles to 8% of the contacts (more coming soon)
• Access to real time data while emailing.

To get started using these, you need to do just two things:

1. Download the latest extension at: https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi
2. Add data to a few key contacts.   (We will start populating it for you in the future.)

And enjoy.

Happy Friday the 13th!

With our last release, we added new merge functionality.  You can now add multiple email addresses to one user and have one set of tags for that person.

To do this, first find the two or more contacts you want to merge in My Contacts.  In this case, I will merge the information I have for Carolyn Bruen and thus have checked her contacts.

After selecting the contacts to be merged,  just click Merge.   The resulting screen shows the merged email addresses as well as the merged tags.

Make any edits you want and then click Save Contact and you’re finished.

The tags are now related to both email addresses and can be edited when emailing either one.

Last night, we posted a new release of the web site and our Add-on.     There are numerous new features to be discussed so I will start with one of my favorites - our new Twitter integration.

When looking at the contacts in our database, we discovered nearly 10% of the email addresses were linked to Twitter accounts.   With over 500K contacts, we figured we could make this data useful.

For our users with Gmail (hosted or not),  we automatically add twitter data on the fly for you.   Email your contacts, in Zentact or not, and if there is a match, we will show you their latest tweet.

In the screen shot below, the first contact’s name and tags are missing because this email was the first I had ever sent to him.  The other two, Jared and Eric, both have complete information since they are in my database.

This is the first of many features that will add real time, actionable data into your email account.    To start to use this feature, just update your Add-on at https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi

When we first launched our private beta, we immediately got feedback from our users that they wanted a log of potential connection points. This ranged from:

When I am in a hurry, I don’t have time to reach out. Can you give me a list of the ones I missed.

to

I like the idea of Zentact, but I find it really distracting as I’m browsing the web. I’d like an option to turn off the browser popup and instead receive a full list of all the link suggestions either as a daily email or on my Zentact profile page. That way, I get all the value of staying in touch with old contacts, but I’m not interrupted as I’m doing other things on the web throughout the day. - Joe Lazarus via Get Satisfaction

Today, we launched Zentact Journal. With this features, we provide to you a list of places you could have made contact with your network but didn’t. We also enabled the ability to turn off those pesky alert boxes.

Want to give it a try, make sure you have the latest extension by downloading it from https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi Then use the web like you would normally for the next 24 hours. As you browse, Zentact will store missed connection opportunities.

Tomorrow, point your browser to http://zentact.com/journal On this page, you will see contacts which were matched to pages your browsed over the last 24 hours. On this page, you can:

• Click the page title link to see the page you could have sent to your network.
• Click to hide the site from future alerts and tracking
• Click Reach Out to email or tweet your contact.

If you decide you don’t want to see the alert in the future, and only use the digest, simply go to My Account, scroll to Preferences and choose “Never Show Alerts” as your Alert setting.

More features are on the way - stayed tuned.

John pushed another update yesterday.  In case you haven’t upgraded, you should by downloading the extension from zentact.com.     Much of the effort in this version is groundwork for our next site update so stayed tuned.  New features include:

• Page Titles are now Email Subjects - When sending an email, the page title will now be your email subject
• Basic Frequency Controls - Some basic frequency controls have been added to reduce unnecessary alerts to reach out
• Improved Handling of Large Contact Lists - A bug has been fixed with processing large contact lists

We are still working on the StumbleUpon bug.

Just in time for the weekend, we have added some new features to Zentact.

• Smaller Package with Same Power - A new and improved alert box with the same functionality in a smaller foot print.
• Gravatar Images - Gravatar images for your contacts are now displayed on alerts and Gmail. Upload your image to Gravatar. More photo features to come - stay tuned.

To update, just login and click the “Download the Extension” link.

For those of you who are addicted to your crackberry or any other phone/email device, we have justed added the ability to use email to update your Zentact account. To do this, just email add@zentact.com with the person’s email address, name and tags. We ignore the body text so feel to write whatever you want there.

Here’s the syntax:

user@email.com Full Name #tag1 #tag2 #tag3

Here’s an example with George Bush

george@whitehouse.gov George Bush #President #tea-totalers #gitmo

You can also update contacts this way. Next week, you could update George with “#ex-president and #Dallas”

Make sure you email from the email account you use with Zentact.

Why would you want to do this? Simple, it allows you to add or update people right after you connect.

Keep it fresh and enjoy!

John just pushed a new version our extension for your networking pleasure. It includes:

• Alert Tracking - We’re now tracking alerts. This will allow us to custom tailor your alert frequency and make using Zentact even more valuable in future releases.
• UI improved on LinkedIn and Yahoo! Mail
• “Reach Out!” added to alert box - Reach out to anyone about anything at any time. Add contacts and edit contact tags in Reach Out! to improve your Zentact experience.
• Right Click Menus - Use a PC, just right click and select Zentact to “Reach Out”.
• Improved Gmail integration - Fixed email matching quirk and single quote bug

Known Bugs in Version 0.6.8:

• Zentact Does Not Alert when Personal Email Editor is selected. To fix: change your My Account settings to use the Zentact email editor.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Interested in knowing more about how common your tags are - take a look at our completely alpha tag feedback page:http://zentact.com/tag_feedback.

Make sure you take the results with a grain of salt. My 300 plus tags are mostly accurate but some are not because of my own unique browsing. For example, “Hearth Restaurant” (entered with “AND”) shows as “May Never Alert”. It alerted two weeks back on a New York Times article about barrel aged beer due to a mention of the bar manager.

Let us know what you think.

And if you are in New York, give Hearth a try. It is excellent!

We previously posted on the ability to add contacts via a Twitter DM. Scott Rafer called out that we didn’t use the originally discussed syntax and method. He’s referring to adding contacts via a public tweet to @zentact.

While we didn’t follow the “exact” syntax, we’re happy to announce that adding contacts via a public twitter message is live.

Here’s the Twitter syntax:

With a full name

@zentact @johnsampson John Sampson #Zentact #networking #San Francisco

Without a full name

@zentact @johnsampson #Zentact #networking #San Francisco

That’s all there is to it to add contacts to Zentact remotely. Becoming better at networking requires both online and offline interaction, this will help keep those interactions in sync. Use it at your next meeting, dinner, conference or whenever you’re away from your computer.

Quick Tips: Be sure you’ve added your Twitter account to your Zentact profile (enter it on the “My Account” link). Also, if you leave the full name out, the user will be classified under the “Unknown Last Name” section when managing contacts.

Why both public and direct message?

Consider using Direct Messages to add contacts when you’d rather not share tag information about one of your contacts with the world — keeping things more private. Otherwise, tweet away publicly - others will love to see how you’re using Zentact with your contacts.

How did we do it (technically)?

To extract your twitter contact adds, we’ve tapped into the Twitter publisher feed offered via the Gnip Consumer API. We parse all tweets sent to @zentact looking for the syntax listed above, and bang - your contacts are added to Zentact.

Thank you Scott!