I’ve joined a few different social networking sites, and when I join I want to quickly add my friends who are already on the site. Many have a nifty feature that allow you to upload your Outlook contacts file, which they use to generate a list of existing users. Sounds harmless, right?

The problem is that some sites can be a bit aggressive about it, and if you’re not careful, they will sent invites to your whole contacts list. We often forget who we have in that list. People we haven’t spoken to in years, or those who we had one short conversation with. In short, people who might be little taken aback to find you still had their contact info. And even more creeped out that you want to add them as “friends” on whatever social site du jour. I just installed the latest version of Skype, which includes your Outlook contacts in your Skype contact list by default (you can turn that off, thankfully). It would suck to accidentally call some girl whose phone number I should have purged years ago.

So I created a personal Do Not Call List. I moved every contact that I’d feel embarrassed about contacting accidentally. As I’m a bit of a data pack rat, I cleared out 37 (!) old contacts. I still have them just in case, but I can now export my current contacts without fear. It also makes finding contacts a bit easier.