Contacts for Thunderbird Aggregates Contact Data from Several Web Sources

Mozilla is now expanding its Contacts experiment with support for Thunderbird. Contacts started life as a Mozilla Labs experiment for Firefox. The add-on pulls contacts data from various online and offline sources to create a comprehensive address book. Its usefulness for Mozilla’s email client is obvious so the release of the Contacts for Thunderbird add-on should come as no surprise.

“Thunderbird Contacts was started by the Mozilla Labs team as Firefox Contacts, an experiment with contacts inside the browser. We’ve adapted their add-on to work inside of Thunderbird and added some new features just for Thunderbird,” Mozilla Labs’ Bryan Clark announced.

“The goal of add-on is to experiment in evolving the address book of Thunderbird beyond what it currently is today. Thunderbird Contacts isn’t a standalone address book, instead it understands that your contacts live on the web as much as they do inside Thunderbird. The add-on can pull in contact data from various services where your contacts already exist,” he explained.

The Contacts add-on has evolved since it was first introduced, adding support for more sources and more features. At this point, the Contacts add-on, for both Firefox and Thunderbird, gets the contacts data from the Thunderbird address book, native address books - on Macs, Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter and Yahoo.

You have to link any of those services you may be using with the add-on. Contacts for Thunderbird then compares the different sources and attempts to merge duplicate contacts, who may be listed on several different services as it is very likely to happen. The smart thing about Contacts is that it doesn’t rely on these sources alone. Once it has created the contacts list, it scours the web for additional info and data on each person.

The idea behind the add-on is solid, having aggregated data on contacts, now that everyone has countless web profiles and means of communication, can prove very useful if not crucial. For now, the Contacts add-on is still in the early stages and some things don’t work properly. It does have a lot of potential and you can expect it to be integrated into Thunderbird and even Firefox at one point.

Contacts for Thunderbird 0.3.6 is available for download here.