Phase 2 of my re-focusing effort is to clean out my IM, VOIP, and Address Book contacts. First, I use 4 different IM accounts and 2 different VOIP accounts -- way too many. Some of my IM accounts have hundreds of contacts in them, some of whom I haven't IMed in months if not years.
It wasn't until I noticed that 3 of my IM contacts had actually died in the past year that I realized that I need to clean out my contacts to a manageable size. I may have gone to the extreme here, but I now have single digit contacts on my personal IM clients, and will expand from there very very carefully.
Yahoo and Microsoft now can IM with each other's contacts - this will enable me to drop one of my IM accounts. Since off-line Hotmail access on Macs is problematic, and Yahoo offers POP access to their email (for a fee), I am retiring my hotmail account. My AOL account is hardly ever used and since iChat can IM with AOL users, I can retire my AOL account completely.
On the VOIP front I currently use Skype and Gizmo. Skype supports video calls, and Gizmo's free calling is temperamental at best. Gizmo is getting the boot, and I will hang on to Skype a little longer.
Not bad, I am down to using two IM accounts and a single VOIP client and my contact list has now dropped to a very manageable size.
I have a feeling I will have a lot more time on my hands now.
Cris Pierry
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