*Note: I have blurred the bulk of my contacts names, pictures and information for their privacy.

You can download OutSync from the link above, and installing is quick and painless.  The first time you launch OutSync, it can take a minute or so to even show up.  While you may think you misclicked or perhaps think the app didn’t launch, give it a minute or two depending on the speed of your machine before you get too impatient.

Once OutSync is up and running you’ll see a window like this prompting you to login with your Facebook credentials:

Once you have logged in OutSync will start pulling your friends list ( this can take a while depending on internet connection speed and number of friends ):

Once that’s done you should see something like this:

This window lets you check off contacts that you want to sync and ones that you don’t want to.  The only difficulty I had was that contacts in Outlook and in Facebook have to match EXACTLY.  So, if your friend on Facebook displays a middle initial or their entire middle name, you have to have it like that in Outlook for the match to be made.  I’d like to see the ability to “link” a Facebook profile with an Outlook contact as well, without the name having to be a perfect match, but maybe that’s a future enhancement.

Once you have selected the contacts that you want to sync you press the “Sync” button and the screen will change to something like:

Followed by:

Once that is done you can open up Outlook and see that the matched contacts do indeed have pictures now:

If you have an iPhone that syncs to Outlook or a Windows Mobile phone where you can use ActiveSync, you can easily then sync your Outlook contacts to your phone.

I recently signed up for Twitter to see what all the fuss is about over there, especially with Facebook having the status updates option. I use Facebook’s status updates to update my status maybe once every few days for big things, but I think Twitter is a better tool for random updates throughout the day. Obviously Facebook has – almost – perfected Social Networking, but here’s why I think I’ll use both, for now at least.

1. Status updates without having to be friends. My friends on Facebook don’t really care about my thoughts on daylight savings time, just like the people following me on Twitter don’t care that I was tailgating down at USC last weekend. I’d like to keep my Facebook friends list just for the people that I might hang out with, or people that I talk to on a regular basis.

2. Public Posting. Twitter allows anyone to go to your twitter page and see what you’re up to (twitter.com/DrLaw) without having to pretend to be your friend on Facebook just to see your updates.  I can also link the twitter updates to this site, something you can’t do with Facebook.

3. My friends don’t care about my random thoughts. By keeping the status updates separate from the tweets (yes, that’s what they’re called if you didn’t know), things stay more organized that way.

TL;DR Version: Facebook for status updates, Twitter for thoughts and musings throughout the day.