For the last week I’ve been reading about a new address book exchange service called Dub. It seems that web sites are ripping the press release almost verbatim and pronouncing this service “cool”. I guess most of the folks writing about the service don’t work for a living where they have to exchange contact information with business people (and not early adopting blogger friends).

I just don’t get yet another address book synchronization tool that seems to do less than what Plaxo does, asks me to upload my entire contact list and sends me a link to download a 1.3 MEGABYTE BlackBerry application to keep things in sync. What am I missing here?

The concept of dub is cool. You get all your friends to join dub. Then you keep your contacts in sync. Anytime you make a change to your dub “My Card” it flows to your contacts.

They have clients for most mobile phones (I tested on the BlackBerry but they have a version for iPhone in addition to others).

Ok – I desperately want to get rid of business cards. In my book the promise of dub is interesting. It’s the execution that I think is problematic.

Weren’t vCards supposed to do away with business cards?

Then along came Plaxo which kept us in sync with other users. Next was LinkedIn and Facebook. These all promise to connect us to friends, family and business associates so our information is always up to date.

Except I didn’t have a lot of luck getting all my contacts to use Plaxo (where I’ve only managed to accumulate 29 connections), LinkedIn or Facebook. I’m missing the reason that suddenly all the contacts in my address book will flock to dub.

Frankly, I’m not willing to ask people to join yet another service where they have to yet again expose their personal information (and if they upload their address book, the information of their contacts).

Which begs the question I’m going to ask – if a huge number of my contacts aren’t using dub — what’s the use of my downloading it?

Another concern I have is the size of the BlackBerry client.

A full 1.3 mb download? That’s a joke, right? A utility to synchronize my BlackBerry phone books is as complex as Slacker Radio (also a 1.3 mb download) and 5 times the size of Google Sync (similar functionality but only 273k download).

Another thing I can’t figure out is how this service is going to do anything for me when it captures such bare bones data.

There’s room for work, cell and fax phone number. No home number? No additional cell number?

Maybe I’m wrong (it wouldn’t be the first time) about this service. It’s possible that when I go out to visit with a prospective client they’re going to greet the opportunity of taking 10 minutes out of their day to create yet another online service where they have to enter in their personal information.

But I don’t think so.

I’m going to give this service a try for a few days and I’ll report back on my updated observations on how useful it is.

Link: Dubmenow

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