Mozilla’s Contacts add-on now available for Thunderbird
Earlier this year Mozilla unveiled a new add-on for Firefox which made is possible for you to access your contacts list aggregated from all your services in the browser. Contact’s didn’t really seem like a very good fit for the browser though, but the add-on was useful nonetheless as it made is very simple to browse your contacts and view details aggregated from multiple sources.
Now Mozilla has released a version of the add-on for their email client, Thunderbird (check out our review of the latest version here), and it seems like a much more suitable fit. The add-on will work with contacts from your Thunderbird Address Book, Native Address Books (for Mac), Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo!, and Twitter. Once you install the add-on you can connect to all these services and it will start pulling in your contacts and even merge contacts with the same email address or full name.
Instead of simply importing web contacts, the Contact add-on makes the Thunderbird address-book more web capable. When you view the Contacts profile of any person in your address-book, it will pull in data from all these configures services and display it in one place. The add-on also has an alternative view for managing your contacts than the Thunderbird address-book.
The Contacts add-on can be downloaded from its Mozilla Labs page or the Thunderbird add-ons directory. The add-on is still in its early stages, so if you do intend to use it, we recommend you be very careful and keep a backup of your Thunderbird address-book.