Smartphones provide easy access to the Internet and expand our options for keeping in touch. In most cases, an email, a text, a tweet or a post can be received on a device at about the same speed. Beyond remembering which contact methods work best for your circle, the bane of so much choice is management. Multiple profiles and address books across many services can be a mess to integrate.
That’s where Brewster steps in. The visual-heavy app merges various social media profiles from your colleagues into streamlined address book entries. Let’s jump in to give it a try.
Building Your Address Book
Your personal address book is built by pulling info from up to six sources. These include iPhone and Gmail contacts, as well as connections on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The more of your own profiles that you add, the more information you’ll also collect about your contacts.
Get started with Brewster using your Twitter or Facebook login.
What Does a Profile Look Like?
Successfully merged entries feature screen-sized pictures of your connections pulled from one of the sources listed above. The contact’s name will be plastered across the top of their picture.
Below the image will be action icons: call, text and email. Provided you have a connection’s phone number and an email address, you can quickly tap the call button to instantly dial, or tap text or email to start composing. If they have multiple phones or emails, a prompt will ask you to choose. Missing bits of contact info will have gray icons.
A typical profile on the left; how a profile appears in the Updates section on the right.
Farther down you’ll see the contact’s Basic Info. Here, details will be showcased such as current job and city, and last school attended. Of course these rely on how up-to-date their profiles are. You can also tap nearby arrows to get more information about these aspects of their lives.
Below Basic Info is a section for Lists, but we’ll get to that later. Afterward is Contact Info, where full email addresses and phone numbers are displayed. Following that section you’ll see Services, which contains the social media and address books that have been compiled for this entry.
Arrows to the right of the social media icons let you check out their profile. Since these arrows don’t open social media apps on your phone, be prepared to login the old-fashioned way: online.
Fixing a Profile
If you’re dissatisfied with a profile pic, move it to the left to see other options from the contact’s social media. Tap the pushpin icon in the bottom right corner of the picture to use a new choice instead.
Notice the pencil icon to the right of a contact’s name and above their picture. This takes you to a screen where you can make edits to their profile. You can edit information that appears in the Basic Info and Contact Info sections. You can also edit the contact’s default name if you want to change it to an alias or actual (see the next section of this write-up).
Basic Info, Contact Info and Services are sections featured in all profiles. Info in the first two can be edited.
Back at the top of the screen, tap the checkmark that has replaced the pencil next to the connection’s name. This will take you back to the profile so you can check your edits. Click the pencil again and scroll to the bottom of the screen to find the Merge and Unmerge icons. While handy, utilizing them can sometimes get tricky.
Merging Unmerged Contacts
It’s common for people to use different social media for different activities, but that sometimes means differing screen names from one site to another. This may prevent proper merging and create multiple entries for a single person on Brewster. When this occurs — and it will — fixing the problem can be simple or involved, depending on the mood of the app.
The best place to start is by opening the profile you want to be the “master” contact. On the editing page, click Merge. From there, possible matches will be displayed from your contacts. If you don’t find who you want, type in the screen name you’re looking for. Once it’s shown, click on it to make a checkmark appear, then click the green box in the top right corner of the screen. This will begin the merge of both profiles.
Brewster lets you add accounts now or later (left). Info is kept private and unchanged on your networks (right).
You’ll have better results if you do this with only two profiles at a time. Adding more than that to the mix sometimes overwhelms the app.
If the merge doesn’t work, you may need to edit the name of second profile to match the master contact. From there the merge should be able to occur, but you also might have to repeat it several times to get them to combine. This seems particularly true for unmerged Twitter and Foursquare accounts, and is one of Brewster’s major pitfalls.
If necessary, contacts can be separated as you see fit with the Unmerge button.
Making a List and Sorting
As mentioned earlier, contacts will show up in Lists, of which there are two types. There are Smart Lists, which group contacts by things such as city, school or employer. You can also create your own Lists, or My Lists, which are easy to populate and edit. My Lists will be featured on members’ profiles, however Smart Lists will be left off.
Looking for more fun ways to group your connections? Scan through a contact’s profile information. For example, say one of your friends lives in Chicago. Tapping the location section of their profile will pull up other contacts who also live in the city. Sadly, these searches can’t be saved or added to My Lists.
Brewster makes Smart Lists for you (left), or you can create My Lists and add contacts to Favorites (right).
There are other automated and customizable lists. For the automated category, there are Smart Lists such as Trending (presumably those with whom your contact is increasing) and Losing Touch (those who were Trending or Frequently Contacted, but have seen contact decrease).
The changeable Favorites list lets you choose who is a member. Given that the Favorites icon appears in the bottom left corner of Brewster’s screen, this list can be filled with those whose information you reach for on a regular basis or might need to get quickly.
Is It Worth the Time and Effort?
Brewster is as easy to search and use as your phone’s address book, but features the visual appeal of the social networks it pulls contacts from. It adds some personality to the usual list format, especially if your contacts have interesting or ever-changing photos. It’s easy to appreciate the number of ways connections can be sorted and grouped. That’s why it’s so tragic that you can’t save these groupings or execute some sort of group messaging using these lists. Another weakness is that using Brewster to open someone’s social media profile takes you to its website rather than its app.
Despite this, Brewster makes up for it with an organized, engaging and easy-to-use interface. Its greatest limitation comes from not importing and matching 100 percent of your contacts correctly. Though you’ll have to spend some time organizing connections, this is likely unavoidable. With people having multiple sets of info, changing names (through marriage or otherwise) and you possibly having some of their out-of-date information in your accounts, it’s inevitable that not everything will line up.
It did get a majority of the contacts sourced for this write-up properly merged — cleaning up what had been muddled attempts to combine info. For that reason, here’s to hoping that in the future, organized content in Brewster can somehow be transferred back to the sites where the information was initially pulled.