Your Address Book Goes Multi-Platform

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Your desk may be filled with all sorts of disorganized paper piles. Your receipts may not be making it into an organized shoebox. Who knows how often you do laundry. You sure aren't balancing your checkbook.

However, no matter how disorganized you are, you keep very sacred your electronic address book. Once upon a time, 20 years ago, you may have started it in a simple word processor or spreadsheet. Then it turned into the mighty Palm organizer, ca 1997. Then a year or two later you finally switched to Microsoft Outlook. By 2001 you had started synchronizing Outlook with your BlackBerry.

BlackBerry Bold 9930

Then in the last couple of years, you also got an iPhone, an iPad and an Android smartphone or tablet. Your online services now include Google and its Gmail and address book, as well as Apple's MobileMe, which turned into iCloud a couple of months ago. Most recently, you also added a Microsoft 7.5 "Mango" smartphone to your arsenal.

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So now you have any combination of several possible multiplatform address book scenarios. The most powerful program at the heart of the nexus remains Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook, you can sort your entries any way you want, with columns determining zip codes, titles, phone numbers, street addresses, and more. There is also no limit on how many addresses you can store there. As far as I can tell, you can hit 100,000 address book entries if you get that far.

Proliferation

Speaking of getting there, is 100,000 address book records that unrealistic anymore? Let's do a little math experiment. On an average weekday, you add four people to your address book: A new customer or two, a friend you met, a supplier, a colleague, someone from the soccer team, a new instructor at school -- four per day is not an unreasonable assumption.

Let's further assume you don't do this 365 days a year, but only 250. Then you are adding 4 x 250 per year, or 1,000. You start getting organized when you get into college, age 18, and you end at the average life expectancy, 78. That's 60 years. 60 years x 1,000 address book records added = 60,000 in your database.