Nimble Social Contact Manager Launches Team EditionsNimble Social Contact Manager Launches Team Editions

Nimble Contact Integrates Connections Across Mail, Social Networks

Users of the social contact and message manager Nimble can now team up to make sales and serve customers.

Nimble is a new venture from Jon Ferrara, the co-founder of Goldmine, that unifies contacts and communications streams across Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The beta edition of the single user Nimble Contacts product has received mostly favorable reviews, and now Nimble is releasing commercial editions.

Nimble Contacts will remain available as a free edition, with upgrades available to the team edition ($9 per user per month), sales edition ($19 per user per month), and CRM edition ($29 per user per month). The team edition gives users the ability to share contacts, the sales edition adds features such as the ability to capture leads from a Web form, and the CRM edition adds features like the ability to track service and support tickets.

"Now, in addition to managing social relationships on a stand-alone basis, you have the ability to do it as a team, and for sales and marketing, and can make it the cornerstone of a social business strategy," said Ferrara, Nimble's CEO.

Nimble provides a unified inbox that consolidates messages from social networks and email (for Gmail and Google Apps users), as well as a consolidated view of updates from social networks and integrated contact records that include data extracted from social profiles and links to those profiles.

Ferrara acknowledged that the beta release sometimes suffered from performance problems because of the requirement to pull data from multiple sources, but he said the system has been redesigned and upgraded to address those issues, with a more responsive in-memory data architecture. "I think we've addressed the architectural issues in this build," he said.

In our testing, the messaging inbox did seem much more responsive.

Nimble is introducing an application programming interface that can be used to extend the platform, with an app store to follow in about 60 days, Ferrara said.

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