Managing contacts

There are lots of ways that I've managed contacts: Outlook, Excel, LinkedIn, Facebook, Lotus 1 2 3... Lately, I've taken to putting contact information in as many places as possible and hope that some combination of my Hotmail account and my iPhone can put all these contacts into some sensible order. There is simply no good single method for keeping track of changing contacts.

So, I'm thinking about going back to the Rolodex. No use constantly updating devices, like Val in Stone Soup. Just flip to the right page and pull up the contact info for one of the 5 people you actually talk to. But the world doesn't work that way, anymore.

What's the alternative? Gardening. Just sort of let things go wild. Pull the weeds (spam) and prune the trees (massive organizations) and hope the data sync takes less than an hour or four.