Using Nimble.com to Unify Your Social Network Contacts

If you are looking to bring some sense to your social networking life, take a closer look at the free tool from Nimble.com. (We last spoke to Nimble's CEO Jon Ferrara here.)

Nimble imports your contacts from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and brings them together in new and interesting ways. Once you activate your account, you grant the service access by providing your user name and passwords to your social networks. It takes a few minutes to do the imports and Nimble will send you an email when everything is finished.

You'll notice that Nimble organizes your contacts by personal name and by company name, giving us a powerful way to search things. For example, let's say I want to find out how many of my contacts are working at Cisco, I enter that term in the search box and see the results. I can see quickly how many of them are in my Facebook or LinkedIn networks or both.

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For each of our contacts we can see which networks they are on and if we hover over each Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn icon, we will see an expanded view of that person's information as they have specified in each network. You can also unfollow someone, direct message them, or go directly to the particular social network itself. We can edit and add information to update this record, too, with information that wasn't automatically imported

When we view the Twitter profile, Nimble automatically goes to the Klout service and report the score of how influential a particular user is.

You can also see on the right-hand pane a social stream that brings together the Facebook and LinkedIn status updates and Tweets that this person has authored. You can also see a consolidated collection of all of your own status updates, or all of your contacts wall and status posts too.

But contacts is just one part of the Nimble story. You can synchronize Nimble with your Google Calendar, and then add tasks for specific people that will then show up in their personal profile. It is a great way to start to keep track of your work teams.

The basic functions that we've shown you here in Nimble are all free, there are several versions in the works with enhanced functionality that will carry modest monthly fees. There are other services that can merge your social networks, including OpenXchange, that are also worth trying out.