Seattle-based online directory provider WhitePages is unveiling a networked address book application that it says can outperform Plaxo and other startups in the market for wrangling your various digital rolodexes.
WhitePages has been testing its Hiya service since last fall, building up knowledge from a base of about 10,000 users. The public beta starts Thursday. It can be accessed through an iPhone app or Web browser.
The aim is to collect all of a user’s contact information, beam it up to the cloud and automatically update the listings by adding WhitePages’ public information databases. The contacts would then include location tagging to see who works nearby if you’re visiting a different city, for instance. Hiya also can push that information back into an iPhone’s built-in contacts and does sorting and duplicate-finding, among other things.
One very important point: Hiya doesn’t combine personal contact lists with the existing WhitePages databases and isn’t planning to sell any of the information. Uploading contacts from a cell phone or computer remains a closed loop between the user and Hiya.
“We don’t publish these contacts. We don’t share them,” senior product manager Amanda Bishop said.
Another Seattle-based online contact sorting service, Gist, made news last month when it was purchased by Research in Motion (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RIMM]]), the maker of BlackBerry smart phones.
Bishop said Hiya is different because it’s not focused on pulling in feeds from social networks or other Web information sources. She said Hiya also tries to differentiate itself by making it easier for contacts to flow both ways, up into the cloud and back down into a phone.
There are some limitations. Right now, Hiya only works with contacts
