I just received an email today from one of my contacts on LinkedIn. It was an invitation to join this new UNYK Address Book application which is apparently in beta.

I think I’ve made it clear that I’m a big fan of anything which centralizes my information and allows me to access it through a web browser from anywhere, so I checked it out.

Overall, it looks quite promising. It will harvest your existing contacts from several different locations (Yahoo!, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, MSN, etc.) and consolidate them. When you sign up you provide your personal and professional contact information, and this in turn keeps your contact record up to date for anyone who has you in their address book. Their premise is that everyone will eventually use them to manage their contact information, and therefore your address book will always be “automatically” up to date, because all of your contacts will have updated their information with UNYK.

My first, and perhaps biggest problem with the service is that they don’t provide an https:// option. So as I’m entering all of this personal and professional data, as well as supplying my login credentials for these other services it’s all going across the wire in plain text!

My second problem is that I’m already using GooSync to store my contacts, and then synchronize them with my HTC phone, which is my life line as far as contact information is concerned.

There is also some considerable controversy regarding the fact that it will effectively “spam” the contacts that you do import inviting them to join UNYK as well. This is no doubt how the email was sent to me. I’m less concerned about this than the previous two points however.

So in order for me to fully embrace this new UNYK solution, it’ll have to get a “secure” presence, and either integrate (which they seem to already do quite well with several other services) with GooSync, or provide the same functionality (syncing with my HTC).

Seems like a cool idea, but it’s not quite mature enough for me to dive in head first. I’ll keep an eye out though!

EDIT:
Since I was more than a little bit surprised that there was no secure access to login and supply my credential for other services, I did a little further digging. UNYK insists in their privacy policy that they encrypt any “sensitive data” that goes across the wire. Here it is directly from their site.

How Secure Are Your Web Servers? [ ^ ]
The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).
To learn more about SSL, follow this link http://www.verisign.com/products-services/security-services/ssl/index.html.

We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

If you have any questions about security on our Web site, you can contact us.

So, since it looked like they used a lot of Web 2.0 technologies I thought possibly they were doing some javascript magic to encrypt the stuff going across the wire, I did a little test with Wireshark to see what got sent. I bit the bullet and imported my gmail contacts, and this was the result, with the password obscured by me, of course.

POST /Scripts/dotNET/ContactFinderProxy/Services.asmx/ImportWebContacts HTTP/1.1
Host: www.unyk.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.17) Gecko/20081021 Firefox/2.0.0.17
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Referer: http://www.unyk.com/Diffusion/main.asp?nub=5EDC7952-7D0D-445F-B49A-0E068F4CA09E
Content-Length: 76
Cookie: BIGipServerwebUnyk=185207306.12310.0000; s_cc=true; s_campaign=en-US-0064; s_cp_persist=en-US-0064; s_sq=%5B%5BB%5D%5D; s_vi=[CS]v1|49503BB000004A0E-A02085E000051AD[CE]; InfosCompleted=3; nub=5EDC7952%2D7D0D%2D445F%2DB49A%2D0E068F4CA09E; __qca=1224815862-86415704-76514833; __qcb=1181521546; UNYK=LoginPassword=&LoginUsername=&RememberOption=0
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
provider=Gmail&username=qwikrex%40gmail.com&password=*********&useOctazen=true

Clearly not secure. I do have to admit however that I seem to have been wrong about the mobile sync, they do provide this, though I’ll have no idea how well it works until they fix the security problem.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been transitioning a lot of my normal computing activities to the internet. What I mean by this, is where I used to use some software based solution for something that had to be installed on every computer I used, or had to be used on only a single computer I’m now using a web based solution.

For instance. I used to manage my email through Mozilla Thunderbird on my home computer. This worked fairly well for me and allowed me to filter spam etc. But in all reality, I really want to be able to access my email anywhere, anytime, with any computer. I’ve now redirected most of my email addresses by either forwarding, or using gmail’s POP3 functionality, and it’s much nicer to manage my email this way, not to mention the ability to search archived stuff way cool!

I’ve also had an ongoing problem of managing my contacts and calendar on my windows mobile based cell phone. You see, the “standard” way to keep this thing synchronized is to use some variety of Microsoft Outlook, and their anti intuitive and very painful ActiveSync. The problem of course is, only one computer can be the “master” which you synchronize with, and if you try to sync with another you run the very real risk of deleting appointments or contacts on either your phone or the computer. Enter goosync. Leveraging my aforementioned move to gmail, I can now synchronize my phone (over the wireless internet connection I’m paying for) with my google calendar and contacts. Sweet!

How about social networking? Well I’ve had a MySpace profile for some time, though I rarely visit it and I’m seriously considering getting rid of it. However, I’ve recently discovered (and become addicted) to Facebook. I find that their particular implementation of social networking seems to allow you to use this for “professional” purposes and mostly dodge the less desirable social networking behavior that turned me off from MySpace in the first place. As a software developer I’m also very attracted to the open API architecture and the multitude of very well written applications, in fact I’m just waiting for the inspiration to hit me so that I can write my own.

Another consequence of joining Facebook is that I (re) discovered Pandora Radio. I had given Pandora a test drive when it was first released, and only the “QuickMix” was available. I was fairly disappointed after only a few minutes of using it and quickly dismissed it as just another over hyped new “Web 2.0″ app. When I noticed that there was a Facebook application for it though, and noticed that what my friends were listening to showed up as status updates I was intrigued, and gave it another try. This time I was able to create my own station, seeded by artists and songs that I liked. Having only supplied one artist seed I found myself LOVING every last song that was played on a station. I now listen to it exclusively where I used to listen to the “chillout” station over at Digitally Imported using Winamp. Still another step away from desktop apps!

One disappointment I have with Facebook however, is that while it does allow you to upload unlimited pictures, and share the albums publicly, it does not have any screen showing all of your public albums. For instance, I can share and link you to this album containing some artistic shots, but I have several other public albums that you’d never know about, unless I directly linked those as well.

In order to remedy that I’m evaluating using some other online photo management service like Picasa then linking it back to my Facebook account. It’s a real shame though since I think that Facebook offers an ease of use that so far I haven’t seen in the alternatives.

My last discovery in the world of Cloud Computing has been a password management system. You see, I have more logins than I could possibly keep track of, in fact I’m CERTAIN that I have logins to forums and other sites that I don’t even remember exist. As a result, I have the same problem of remembering passwords that many computer users experience, and I’m not great about picking unique passwords! To resolve that I went looking for some good online password management. Now, I’ve conducted this search before, and come up wanting for security or functionality in the solutions I’ve found. Not so this time!

Allow me to introduce Passpack. What I like about this is that it uses a lot of AJAX, and consequently the information I enter is encrypted in my browser before it even hits the wire! Very cool. It also has the ability to generate strong passwords then automatically enter them for me at the login prompt for the website! I could go on about the features for a while but I’ll save that for another blog entry when/if I feel so inclined. If your interested, or conducting your own search for an online password manager I recommend Passpack, go ahead and follow the link over there and check it out.