Montreal Tech Watch

Unyk, an online address book, has announced they have reached this month 6 millions users.

Launched 2 years ago, Unyk is produced by the same team behind the successful Netclub, the dating website sold to the american giant match.com. Unyk is very similar in essence to Plaxo by managing your different contact information. While Plaxo introduced itself as a way to always have updated information about your connections, Unyk markets itself as a way to have a unique life-lasting identity, with an ID like 619 NSK. For me however, beyond “marketing speak”, both services are the same. Their viral growth is both based on getting your contacts from your email accounts and updating them after your registration. Like Plaxo, Unyk also provides premium services to its users to monetize its service.

2 years ago, services like Unyk were innovative. For instance, it provided a way to back up and re-sync your address book whenever you get a new computer. Many were also switching their email accounts to new providers like GMail. But from what I see, managing email and contact information is not anymore an area of pain growth on the Internet. Younger generations are using instead MSN and are facebooking each other. Another problem currently is the diversity of web services people are invited to join: youtube, facebook, flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, livejournal, myspace, digg etc. and managing these online identies is now the current problem. Services like Plaxo and Unyk are in the ideal position to take over this central role, by providing for instance OpenID services, managing the user’s social network and making it portable over third-party websites, and meta-coordinating their web activity and content. Unfortunately, Plaxo has taken the wrong path and turned itself into a social network, which is crazy considering all the various market leaders already in place. I guess it’s now Unyk’s turn to proove they can innovate, in the right way.