my quest to find a universal address book not named plaxo continued with skydeck, a company that uses phone calling records to prioritize contacts and keep you aware of usage amounts and costs. provide your carrier’s login credentials, install a firefox extension, import your address book, and you’re off.
installation went smoothly. my multi-entry, mac generated .vcf file was handled no problem, and after a small glitch due to a firefox upgrade, the toolbar was working. soon the skydeck website presented an address book ordered by communication frequency and amount – similar to the way digsby will let you order your im contacts – a nice feature.
click on a contact and you get personal and work numbers and addresses as you might expect, but you also get a call record and usage stats, similar to xobni, for outlook. this is nice enough.
returning to the list view, options are presented to either email or call a contact. email works as you might expect, invoking your default client, but the call invocation is not at all what i expected. given that skydeck analyzed a given phone number, i thought click a click to call would ring my cellphone and my contacts’, instead, it tried to make the call locally, opening skype. that worked, but it wasn’t what i expected. moreover, i can already do this from the mac’s address book.
the next logical thing to try was calling up the skydeck site on my phone, but they do not seem to have a mobile site, and the regular web address didn’t play nicely with my phone. not that this is ideal anyway, my phone’s native address book performs much better for making calls, and it is here, not in an additional application, that i would rather see a list organized by activity.
lastly, i should probably mention the skydeck toolbar. it presents two graphs, to show call minutes and text message sent, in order to prevent overage charges. given the number of unlimited plans announced recently, i’m not sure how long this information will be useful. moreover, i’m not sure the browser is the best place for this information, given that it’s for a mobile phone.
skydeck is free and over time promises to “introduce a range of products and services that will help consumers and small businesses to get maximum value out of their cell phones and we will charge a fee for some of these.” i’m curious what they have in mind. some of the things they have done are interesting, but overall, the offering as it exists, is not terribly compelling to me.