Humin came out of beta this month. The app pulls your social media and phone contacts together to make the perfect mobile rolodex, one with living, breathing, updating contact info with zero duplicates and multiple contact points.
The app is one of a growing group of services that grow smarter as you use them. Humin aims to be the assistant who whispers the names of your acquaintances in your ear as you shake their hands at a party. “Oh [whisper, whisper] Jack! How nice to see you again. It’s been ages since I saw you in [whisper, whisper] New Jersey!”
The app adds context to your meetings, giving you updates about your fellow attendees. It also has a wicked smaht search engine, which lets you search by traditional fields such as name or email, but also lets you find people you “met last week” or who “are friends with” another contact.
I downloaded it several months ago when it was in beta, and I deleted it within 48 hours. Here’s why:
- I tend to keep my iPhone contacts separate from my professional contacts, so I didn’t like that every social media contact in my world was now accessible on my phone.
- Also, you’ll lose the ability to scroll a list of contacts. Now you always have to search for some known fact about them.
- The app takes over your voicemail for whatever reason. You have to dial the Humin Activation number that appears in your contacts to set it up, and then deactivate with the Humin Deactivation number. And when you delete the app, the contacts stay in your address book. Weird.
- The biggest problem for me is the spamming issue. When you call up a contact, there’s a little “Verify info” link on their picture. When you click this link, the dang thing automatically reaches out to your contact to ask him/her to verify their contact info for your address book. Since this app pulls in almost everyone you’ve ever had electronic contact with, you could end up bugging the heck out of people without you knowing it. No one wants to be That Guy.
Humin.
