Okay, making Plaxo look lame isn’t that hard. But as Plaxo has been groping around the past year trying to turn itself into a social network to attract a buyer (cough, Comcast), a little startup in the Netherlands called Soocial has been building a kick-ass contact management service that syncs all of your contacts between your desktop, cell phone, and a growing list of Web services. This company won one of the vote-in demo spots at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam (CEO Stefan Fountain pictured above), and their video demo featuring David Hasselhoff (shown below) stole the show. TechCrunch has 300 invites to the beta that you can grab here.
Soocial is not yet everything it could be, but it has a lot of potential, and its approach to syncing contacts is the right one. Right now, it supports an impressive 400 phones, contacts in Gmail, 37Signals’ Highrise CRM app, and contacts in your Mac address book on your desktop. (You gotta love a startup whose beta software works only on a Mac.) Support for Outllook on Windows machines is coming soon, as is syncing with LinkedIn, and contacts in Windows Live and Yahoo.
With all of these services and devices, if you add a contact in one, it updates your contact list and details everywhere else. This two-way syncing is what is really impressive. It even works with the iPhone, although only by syncing through iTunes on the desktop. Soocial also has a lame Facebook app, because Facebook does not allow syncing of contacts yet.
As more services open up with data portability and open APIs, Soocial will add them as well. All Soocial wants to do is sync your contacts no matter where you keep them. It is not trying to be a social network, and it is not trying to grow by spamming its users friends. “Not everybody has friends, but everybody has contacts,” says Fountain.
The startup is based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and has raised 300,000 Euros from angel investors. It was founded in November, 2006. The business model is unclear, but the founders hope to be able to charge subscriptions to power users. Enjoy the video:
Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.
(Photo by Anne Helmond)
Neat site and features ..
Hell ya I got in.
I got in too. Still waiting for my drop box beta invite though….
Looks like you ‘crunched them. The site is timing out now.
yep.. site went down.. hope that won’t happen with my contacts!
Excellent demo video.
I want, I want! Site appears to be dead.
Looks like the network is bogging down, some sort of network surge!
We’re looking at what we can do to fix it.
@Federico… and no your contacts are safe in Soocial!
Hoff’s still big in Holland. And Germany.
Great video
lol. The site is already down.
Yeah - you crunched them.
Hi Guys,
We’re experiencing a lot of traffice due to this article. The server is fine but it seems like we’re having some trouble accepting so many connections on our hosting network. It’s up but its slow at the moment. We’re working on it.
cheers and thanks!
Simon
Soocial.com
Great new web 2.0 service.
We will hear about it in the next months for sure.
Soocial rocks! My contacts do so too!
I want a cheeseburger…
@stefan: finally, a master contact list across everywhere! here’s to hoping you get outlook functionality soon. i would sure pay for such a service. oh, but the website has to work.
Booya, snagged one for the buddy.
To compensate for the slowness of the site, the first 150 people to email to support@soocial.com will get an invite.
cheers and our apologies for this inconvenience,
Simon
Soocial.com
Hmm, they might want to update that video, he said “in a nutcase” (at 2:12) instead of “in a nutshell”, which conjures up somewhat negative images of padded rooms and straitjackets.
the reg code is TC-MONKEY-BALLS. that’s pretty funny.
I wondered why Plaxo was trying to become a social network. Sorry but that not in the cards broseph. You should have stuck to your original plans…
Sure, I’ll trust them with my contacts when they couldn’t even take a little TC traffic.
Anyway, try https instead of http.. I got in using https instead
@Will (#18), that looks like a Dutch idiosyncrasy creeping in. Cut us Europeans a bit of slack, we might surprise you.
Yep, getting crunched but using the code above got me through the signup page which I could get to load!
will you idiots please do some load testing ? for fox sake
sorry for the slugginess guys, we’re working on it and should be much faster already.
Dracula…have some VC money to pay for some load balancing?
@Will (#18) that was actually a pun, see our slide from our last presentation http://img.skitch.com/20080416.....dbwww4.png
To everyone else, we’re working very hard to get the server back up, seems like a weird mix of server sweating it’s ace off, and network congestion at our datacenter.
It works fine in the Netherlands.
@Simon from Soocial , what kind of hosting infrastructure are you guys using?
Looks like you guys are using RoR? One suggestion- page cache your landing and signup pages
8700 blackberry not supported. sad pants.
the invites are gone (that was fast!) - but still some of the 150 invites left over if you mail support@soocial.com
@Khang Toh,
Yeah we’re on RoR. We’ve page cached them, but thanks for the suggestion anyway.
@r if you can sync your blackberry with your Apple addressbook it’ll sync on straight from there with Soocial.com
@Soocials: Just curious how large is your pack (mongrels)?
Hmm… I got it to synch with my gmail just fine, but for some reason validation fails when I try to set up the mail.app connection.
Anyone out there seen this issue? I couldn’t find it on soocial’s page.
Khang Toh, you can talk to us @ our Campfire: https://soocial.campfirenow.com/7b5d4
Seems pretty useless unless you have a mac. No clear way to sync gmail, etc…contacts and not all phones sync. I for one was very disappointed. Search box on the support doesn’t work, and when I asked in chat, as suggested on their site, I got no help.
Back on the contact management hunt…
@Daniel - Looks like today is not Soocials day
Campfire says:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
We can’t let you in right now
The limit of people who can chat in this account has been reached. As people come and go slots may open up.
You can try again at any time.
hey Melissa, sorry about that. We answered your question just after you left
The answer was anyways that we sync two says with GMAil using the Contacts API. If you go to ‘Connections’ you can add GMail to sync with.
Stefan, thanks for clearing that up, seemed a bit odd to me
Khang - upped the limit - but theres still a limit to it…sorry about that.
‘You gotta love a startup whose beta software works only on a Mac’
Ridiculous. I’m sorry, this is just a silly waste of time.
Are you using SyncML? If so, we can probably help.
Lou
Nexthaus
No Outlook support? How can they even attempt to become something useful when they don’t support the business world’s #1 email and contact client? I for one am very disappointed. I was looking forward for something to replace plaxo but I guess they are still too wet behind the ears…
@Lou, yeah we are using SyncML. We should talk
BTW Just to clear things up, we are hosted by RimuHosting. It was not their fault, but our own inexperience in getting crunched. They did an good job getting us up again. Their support is very good.
2 way syncing? i’ve had that via plaxo and my win/mac/winmo/gmail accounts for a LONG time.
what is so innovative?
The guy in the video has the right kind of glass for tastings - good for wines and hard liquors.
wet behind the ears? guilty!
in the end we’ll want to be supporting any software/webapp that manages contacts (if it makes sense).
Outlook is super high on our priority list and we’re working on it, so hopefully we’ll have it out soon.
uthiroid - plaxo does 2 way syncing with GMail? I’d like to see!
Plaxo works well to sync between my Mac, Outlook , Google contacts/calendar and iPhone.
Sorry for the potshot, but “Soocial” is a name only a hopeful acquisition target could love.