{"id":3580,"date":"2016-01-05T09:08:22","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T13:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/?p=3580"},"modified":"2016-01-05T09:08:22","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T13:08:22","slug":"contact-amnesia-or-good-friends-are-cloud-worthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/05\/contact-amnesia-or-good-friends-are-cloud-worthy\/","title":{"rendered":"Contact Amnesia, or Good Friends are Cloud Worthy"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I got a new phone, so I lost all of my contacts, text me your names….”<\/p>\n

Most of us probably know someone that has asked this question, usually on Facebook.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe you have even had to do this yourself from time to time.\u00c2\u00a0 At best this is\u00c2\u00a0inconvenient, at worst you could lose something really important.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0As a geek by profession, this would be personally embarrassing if it happened to me.<\/p>\n

What if I told you it never has to happen again?<\/p>\n

Let me now boldly claim:\u00c2\u00a0 I have never lost a digital contact in my life.\u00c2\u00a0 Every contact that I have ever created\u00c2\u00a0is still with me, through over a dozen different cell phones on different platforms.\u00c2\u00a0 Even better?\u00c2\u00a0 This monumental act of digital hoarding took exactly ZERO effort on my part.<\/p>\n

How did I manage to achieve this seemingly herculean feat so easily where others fail?<\/p>\n

It’s simple:\u00c2\u00a0 store contacts in your email account, and not on your phone.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s it.<\/p>\n

\"Cloud<\/a><\/p>\n

Every cloud email provider today (outlook.com, gmail.com, etc.)\u00c2\u00a0has a contact feature that allows storage of all kinds of details about your contacts aside from their email address.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 This storage of info is in the cloud, accessible from any device and survives the dreaded phone loss\/damage\/replacement problem easily. (In fact, when you combine that with OneDrive, there’s actually nothing stored\u00c2\u00a0permanently on my phone that I can’t\u00c2\u00a0recover instantly or with little effort).\u00c2\u00a0 Depending on your phone OS you may need to configure the contacts a little differently, but they all support this.\u00c2\u00a0 My vote goes to Office 365 or Outlook.com for pure simplicity, but you can get this done with most other major email providers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Jar

What’s that phone number?
<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Having your friend’s\u00c2\u00a0phone numbers stored on your phone’s internal SIM card is like telling them you don’t care enough to never forget them, and that might make them sad.<\/p>\n

Good friends are cloud worthy<\/strong>.<\/h3>\n

However, I should warn you: this beautiful piece of advice comes with a dark side… Eventually you will need to get into that contacts list and clean it out.\u00c2\u00a0 Your dentist from 15 years ago?\u00c2\u00a0 Yeah, he’s still in there.\u00c2\u00a0 Even scarier:\u00c2\u00a0 Your ex?\u00c2\u00a0 Probably still in there.<\/p>\n

So, you might want to add\u00c2\u00a0a reminder (in your Calendar, but that’s another post)\u00c2\u00a0for yourself to spend a minute or two every 6 months to delete those old contacts….\u00c2\u00a0 It could save some awkward conversations.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I got a new phone, so I lost all of my contacts, text me your names….” Most of us probably know someone that has asked this question, usually on Facebook.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe you have even had to do this yourself from … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[430],"class_list":["post-3580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech","tag-cloud-friends"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/JarJar.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piGNU-VK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3580"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3623,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3580\/revisions\/3623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vallentyne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}