The end of Joyent Connector, now what for my contacts?

Last month Joyent ceased to support their Connector suite of applications, the combined email, contacts and calendar app, next month they’ll be stopping the service completely. The Ruby on Rails app is several years old now and can’t really keep up with other offerings on the market, besides Joyent have moved their focus elsewhere, outside of basic hosting. Fair enough, I can see why they’re making the move, the product is no longer central to their business aims and as time creeps on the app will drain resources as it becomes harder to maintain.

Not everyone at Joyent used Connector, I did although not a daily basis. It was a useful, secure and reasonably stable place to keep my contacts and important snippets of information. Now that the service is coming to an end there’s one small question I have to ask. What now?

I have to keep this information somewhere and realistically it has to be online in the form of some sort of application. Irritatingly there’s no way I can move all my contacts from Joyent Connector in some sort of import export process, so I’m going to have to move them one by one. Mmmmm.

So now I’m looking at either Highrise from 37 Signals or Contacts that form part of Google’s Gmail. There’s pros and cons of both. I’m already using Gmail and it’s free but on the other hand I think I’d like to use something that’s not Google or Yahoo, I use those apps all day every day and sometimes fear Goo-hoo overload. However, I’m already using Google calendar and that seems to link seamlessly with Gmail, so maybe using contacts is just an extension of that. Google apps are free too.

I’d rather stamp on my own fingers that have to do this again in a hurry!