BBC Click gives Address Book top marks for keeping people in touch via Google.

WikiWorldBook, the online “Global Address Book”, has received an outstanding review from the BBC’s flagship technology TV show, Click, which is broadcast on the BBC News and BBC World television channels.

Click Presenter Kate Russell seemed particularly impressed by the service providing a “simple and effective way for people to get in touch” and a “zero commitment design”. Its maintenance-free design means that its users do not have to invest more than the initial time it takes to set up their free account – which can be as little as one minute, depending on the amount of information they wish to display. The original programme can be watched here on the BBC Click website.

The free online address book uniquely enables people to be easily found via a name search on Google and then be contacted instantly by email – without revealing their email address (and without the person contacting them having to register). The service is similar to a telephone directory, but for email. A built-in “contact form” enables the user to hide their email address and still be contacted by email at that address.

Users can list as much or as little of their personal and work contact details, social links and other information on their own free address book page – with the minimum being name, gender and nationality. All the user’s links (IM, VOIP, email and websites) are hyperlinked to the appropriate service for one click operation and the social links feature means that a user can aggregate all of their online identity into one place.

Verisign Trust Seal

We have now added a VeriSign Trust Seal to WikiWorldBook.

This should help provide first time visitors to our site with the highest levels of trust and security.

VeriSign Inc is the leading provider of Internet infrastructure services, such as Trust and SSL Seals and Certificates.

Latest Press Release - Challenging Telnic's dot tel domains

Our latest Press Release focused on the challenge our free online address book represents to the dot tel domains.

It was picked up by a large variety of media outlets including Yahoo News - http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20100119/bs_prweb/prweb3459084_1;_ylt=A0oGktzw4lZLmYAAgztTDqMX;_ylu=X3oDMTBvdmM3bGlxBHBndANhdl93ZWJfcmVzdWx0BHNlYwNzcg--

In truth, I view the whole campaign as much like the "A lot less bother than a Hoover" advertising campaign (where I believe the two companies had the same parent company) - a symbiotic relationship in which we both benefit from the increased exposure. I'm not sure Telnic view the relationship like that though!

For those people who like the fact that they can be found via the telephone directory / White Pages, both these services offer a great way to be also easily found and contacted by old friends and colleagues on the internet via a name search on a major Search Engine - and the user can specify the means of contact depending on what they choose to show - be it email, IM, VOIP or even home / work terrestrial mail address. All these services are themselves hyperlinked, so that they launch with one click.

Clearly our address book does not have the same technology advantages as the dot tel domains hosted on the DNS, but I think for the majority of people wanting an easy to manage, easy to update, search engine optimized page where they can display their contact details in a structured format which can be found easily on a Google or a Yahoo search, our service offers an excellent free solution.

The two major advantages our address book currently have over the dot tel domains are firstly that our users can be found and contacted within three clicks of a Google search of their name - without revealing their email address (This is not possible on a dot tel domain); and secondly that users' address book listings (their profile page)are usually indexed between 2 and 7 days. Reports suggest that Telnic struggles to get its dot tel domains indexed quickly. Certainly when I experimented with them a year ago they took weeks and sometimes months to get indexed. That suggested to me that either Google perhaps didn't trust them particularly despite them being hosted on the DNS, or perhaps Telnic made it too difficult for a newly registered domain to be found and spidered by the Googlebot.

The third advantage is only a suspicion of mine - that our address book listings (profile pages) rank better in name searches in the SERPs than the dot tels - but as I haven't yet commissioned the detailed testing of this theory, this currently remains unfounded. Certainly our members don't need to do any work to get their profiles ranking high up (on average) in the search engine results whilst I have read that Telnic advise their domain purchasers of ways and means to achieve this - which suggests that they find it necessary to do so.

Perhaps I should commission that testing sooner rather than later!

Launching Our Free Contact Button for Blogger Blogspots and Other Websites

It Hides Your Email & Shares Your Social Profiles

If you are concerned about publishing your email address on your website or blog for spammers to find, you should try our new free Contact Button.

The Contact Button enables you to hide your email address and share all your social media profiles in one discreet widget.

You can find demonstration buttons on each of the following sites - Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr, WordPress and MySpace.

You no longer have to write your email address as robert (at) gmail.com to stop the spammers from either automatically or manually harvesting it. It simply disappears into this button where it’s encoded so no one can see it.

The Contact Button has a graceful dropdown which opens on rollover to display an email icon and your social profiles – should you include any. If a visitor clicks the “Email Me” icon, the email form opens on the same webpage - so the visitor stays on your site. The Button fits neatly into either the Sidebar on a blog, or can be automatically inserted at the end of each post. Visitor’s messages go direct to your regular email account.

The Contact Button text is customisable – the default is “Contact Me” and a range of icons to show what you have loaded your button with (either email or social profiles or both) and these can be altered to suit the users needs.


Sharing Your Social Media Profiles

How many “Social Profiles” have you got? How do you want people to find them?

Sharing Your Social Media profiles with your website / blog visitors has never been easier, without you cluttering up your sidebar with lots of links.

Your social profiles appear on the dropdown and open in a new window when clicked, so that any visitor doesn’t immediately and unintentionally leave your site. You can also list all your means of IM and VOIP contact, so that your visitors can chose the most convenient means of contacting you. There is even a “More” link which opens in a separate scrollable frame, just in case you have more than 9 profiles. With over 160 social networks supported, the Contact Button plugin is now one of the most extensive profile sharing tools available.


Auto Update

All you have to do to automatically update the information on your button in real time, is to update your stored information on WWB. So when you change your email address or add profiles, you don’t ever have to reload the button code.


Installation

Installation on any website is made simple with easy visual instructions displayed in a range of Button Installation Visual Guides.


Supported Sites

The button supports over 160 social media sites including:-

Blogger Classmates Digg Facebook Flickr LinkedIn LiveJournal MySpace StumbleUpon Tumblr Twitter Typepad Yahoo YouTube Wikipedia Wordpress

New Website Design For Our Address Book

Our Global Address Book now has a great new design and is even clearer and better looking than before.

Whilst the basic navigation has stayed the same, the pages have become simpler and less cluttered. You can see the type of address book entry you could have with this John Smith profile.

Visual Guides

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We have also introduced a range of Visual Guides to explain the easy to use features of our online address book and our new Contact Button.

The Address Book Visual Guide gives a list of our Address Book features from creating your own free easy to maintain page in our address book - to our unique email gateway that enables you to be easily contacted without having to reveal your email address.

Friends, family and/or business associates will be able to find and contact you within 3 clicks of a Google Search of your name – without them having to register with us. This free service is totally unique on the internet.

Your address book entry (ie your profile page) is highly search engine optimized for your name - your name appears in the url address, the page meta tags and the page title. Essentially, this means that within a short space of time, your page should be ranking highly in Google and Yahoo for a search of your name.

Your "Vanity URL" address containing your name (eg /profile-8464-John-Smith) is useful for two reasons, firstly it makes your url address highly recognisable as yours if you want to share it with somebody and secondly this makes ranks you higher in the search engine results for your name, which enables you to be found more quickly.

The Contact Button Visual Guide gives a list of Contact Button features from hiding your email to sharing your social media profiles. The Button's dropdown menu expands to hold as many profiles as you have - aggregate your online social identity by bringing it together in one simple compact place!

Simply paste the Contact Button on your website, blog or forum in place of your email address. The Button can also hold all your IM/VOIP addresses (AIM, Yahoo IM, MSN IM Jabber IM, Google Talk, Skype).

The button comes with a range of easy to follow installation instructions in Visual Guide format.

The Site Visual Guide is an overview of our free online Address Book website from our new Contact Button to our Free People Search, Trace Lost Friends and Relatives and Search Alert.

Our People Search engine enables anyone to search for a person and obtain highly filtered results, for free and without being registered. Find photos, social networks, social media and highly filtered results for the person you are searching for.

Lost contact with friends or family? Our online people tracing service is one of the most powerful tools on the web to re-establish contact with someone – and it will only take you 5 minutes of your time.

Find out when someone has Googled you. Because your profile will rank high in the Search Engine results (unless you have a very common name) your profile will be a magnet to someone trying to find you. When they do, we capture their details. Very useful for job applicants, business professionals, business owners or even people dating!

FAQ's

We also now have detailed FAQ’s for our website and our new Contact Button:-

Site FAQ’s

Button FAQ’s

And finally an Our Company page! You can also find out more about us on our Companies House page.

Free Online Address Book

We'll also be introducing mobile pages in 2010, so that your address book details will easily load into any portable device - in other words, if someone views your page from a mobile device a simlified page will load (rather than the full page you currently see on your computer) making the page easier to view on that device.

Why pay for Telnic’s “Dot Tel” domains when you can get so much free with us?!

Online Address Book - New Unique Introductory Video

WikiWorldBook has got a great new video on its Home Page. It explains just how our free online address book works and just how easy it is to:-

• Be found on a Google Search of your name

• Become freely contactable by email without revealing your email address.

• Store and manage all your contact information directly on the internet without the need to set up and manage your own website.

Plus:-

• Your emails go to your regular email account.

• You can show as little as your name and nationality - or as much about you as you wish.

• Comprehensive privacy settings allowing you to share your information with your friends and no one else.

• Store, update and publish all your contact information, web links and keywords directly on the internet under your own unique public profile.

• Easy to use, fast and accessible from most internet devices.

• Fast registration – in less than a minute.

• Leave as fast as you registered and take all your information with you.

http://wikiworldbook.com/

Film makers

The video was made by the talented Oxford Brookes Film Productions, in the style of a CommonCraft video.

http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/filmstudies/film_productions

Oxford Brookes Film Productions has also recently had their short film “Double or Nothing”, directed by Govind Chandran, accepted for the Cannes Film Festival in May. We wish them the best of luck with it.

New Look & Functionality On The Way

Our site’s about to change!

We’ve employed some talented new designers to give our site a great new look.

It will retain all its existing functionality, but its overall appearance will change – in some places a little and in some places a lot. The site will also gain substantially new functionality – but we can’t say much about this until it goes live in less than a month…

Watch out for it in early April!