November 03, 2009, 9:01 AM — If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know how much effort goes into growing your network and adding contacts. But it's even harder to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network.
Enter a Web service called Open Xchange. You can set up a free account and within a few minutes have it set to automatically bring in all of your contacts from Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a few other places as well. What is more important though is that you can easily publish all this information (or some of it) to a Web site, or download it to a comma-separated file, so that you stay in control of your data at all times.
If you want to get a feel for the software, watch a screencast video on the product here.
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This tip was adapted from 'How to extract your LinkedIn contacts' by David Strom.
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