How I used and lost all my phone numbers in just one week

Last week I decided to explore ZYB.com. The guys from this service say it brings mobile data to life. Sounds pretty exciting to me. So I started to bring my own mobile data to life. And before I knew it, my data was leading a life on its own. I’ll tell you what happened.

I’ve uploaded all my phone numbers to ZYB in order to store my phone numbers online and enrich them with all kinds of information about people I have in my phone book. But when I checked if there were any other ZYB users in my phone book, I discovered that I was the only one. At this point ZYB had lost all it’s relevance to me. But quitting ZYB without really knowing what it is didn’t seem right, so I decided to invite a few friends by sending them an automatically generated ZYB-invite text message. This is where it all went wrong. Somehow I hit the ‘invite all’-button which was positioned one millimeter from the ‘invite’-button. At that point many phones around me in the office started ringing. Yes, this meant that I had sent a text message to all the 500 people in my phone book. I’ve spent the rest of the day on answering calls and text messages from disheartened old friends, business partners and colleagues who asked what the hell ZYB was. I couldn’t tell them, I just apologized.

So my first experience with ZYB was pretty bad. But a closer look on ZYB doesn’t quite change my opinion. ZYB has very few users, no one in my phone book uses it and after inviting all of them, still none of them are using it. Many users seem to be Danish, which gives me the impression that most users are friends of the Danish developers of ZYB. The ZYB community looks pretty boring too, probably because of the lack of users.

The biggest advantage of ZYB would be the possibility to store your phone numbers online, safely and secured (but don’t hit the wrong button). The funny thing is that a couple of days later I updated my Nokia N95 8GB and accidentally lost all my phone numbers. All my numbers were still in ZYB, so I could just download them back to my phone. But because of the automatic synchronization with both my office PC and my Mac at home I got all my numbers back before I could even think of ZYB. So what does ZYB really add?