We Need To Talk About Rolodexes

7 June 2026

I was scrolling social media after lunch, getting packed up for a trip to my mother's for a couple days, when I notice my girlfriend Juniper asking about digital rolodexes. The problem was simple: she has met a bunch of cool people and good contacts while at a speedrunning marathon, but within a couple weeks she was starting to lose track of who was who and what their contact details were. It was frustrating, and a problem that seemed very solvable. On instinct, I responded to her saying this was a special interest of mine, and she immediately texted me to ask for more info.

After a solid fifteen minutes of info-dumping, she settled on one of my suggestions to look into, and thanked me for the information. And it was then that I realized that, much like I had spread the good word about web calendars, it was time for me to talk to folks about contacts.

In the interest of similar data collection to my previous post, I also asked Mastodon what they do for contact information. What I learned is that roughly one third of my reach don't do anything at all:

I thankfully was not the only person who felt mildly unnerved by the number of people saying "No" to this query. So I think it's time we talk about keeping track of people's conact information!

Rolodexes, contact cards, and address books

Oddly enough, unlike web calendars I think it's necessary to take a moment and more fully define what exactly a rolodex is, and why I am using this term as opposed to other more generalizable terms.

The rolodex was a physical contact card manager invented in the 1950s to hold contact information for a large number of people. Using a folder binder wrapped around an axis, it allowed a huge number of individual contact cards to be sifted through, organized with dividers, and accessed without needing complicated filing methods. It was very searchable, and in many ways revolutionized the business world. It was the Kleenex of the contact card world, and it was nothing to sneeze at. Don't worry, they're coming to my house with hammers for that pun.

The rolodex prioritized fast searchability and ease of access in a way that other physical solutions hadn't quite managed yet. You could keep an address book, a phone book, a ledger, a journal, a stack of cards, a folio, but the more you had the more cumbersome it became. The rolodex used gravity as a second hand for the user, keeping the book open as you flipped through it.

The word "rolodex" is a contraction of "rolling index". A rolling file of index cards. I like this term because it emphasizes the usability of the product (rolling) while maintaining a neutral data-type for the product (index). Using terms like "contact cards" or "address book" isn't just cumbersome, but perhaps inaccurate. What do I call somewhere that I may keep one person, whom I only know the address of, and another I only know the phone number of?

So I'm going to keep saying "rolodex", but do know I'm not somehow more correct or accurate for doing so. I just enjoy it.

Going Digital

Since the birth of the world-wide-web, and the realization that communication was about to be revolutionized in new and exciting ways, it became evident we needed some method of arranging contact information, saving it, and distributing it. And so, in 1990 vCard was born by a joint venture of Apple, IBM, and AT&T. Since then the format has changed hands several times, before landing with its current managers at CalConnect. We didn't get into it at the time, but CalConnect are also who manages iCalendar!

vCard is an odd bird. Whereas iCalendar was specifically built to conclusively reconstruct many of the issues with its predecessor vCalendar (you may notice a theme here), vCard has... not. It structurally has many oddities, and some rather odd version incompatibility which can make data portability very odd. But it has persisted as the primary format of contact systems, and further crystallized into the contact management system CardDAV.

Ah, yet again we meet a DAV! If this is your first We Need To Talk About... you may be unfamiliar, but the DAV family are a series of protocols used to synchronize data between client applications and web servers. CalDAV is the backbone of web calendars, and CardDAV is the backbone of (most¹) web rolodexes.

"Web" Rolodexes?

Much like sometimes you want to access your calendar in multiple places, it's natural to want to access your contacts in multiple places! It's also, in my opinion, a bit of an opsec nightmare. You have to trust that your contact server won't leak information. So if you're going to sync anything to the cloud, remember that the cops will probably pull it if you protest too loudly, and foreign states will probably try to hack it if you have security clearance. It's also worth noting that if you have any variety of web e-mail access, such as Gmail or Outlook, you probably already have a web rolodex, regardless of whether you want to.

That said, if you aren't dealing with politically-sensitive information and state secrets, you could use any of the following and not worry about losing your address book if you drop your phone in the toilet:

• Commercial options:
  • Google Contacts
  • Apple iCloud
  • Fastmail Contacts
  • Proton Contacts
• Libre options:
  • Nextcloud Contacts
  • Radicale
  • Baïkal

So what's the point?

This is an extremely-solved problem. We have been needing to keep in contact with eachother ever since we moved beyond villages and into cities. And now that our contact networks have grown intercontinental, it is no wonder we need more robust solutions. But I write this in 2026, and most people aren't even aware that this problem was solved over 35 years ago! And vCard is certainly not perfect, but it is the closest we have to a reliable standard to keep your information yours and out of the claws of vendor lock-in. If you want to, you can maintain a digital rolodex entirely by keeping a folder full of .vcf files!

I think digital rolodex software has many advantages over a physical one. It isn't limited by space, and you can expand contact information as much as you need. If somebody has an extremely long name that you have trouble spelling, you can copy-paste it. Maybe you want to record articulate pronoun information, or keep track of nicknames. If your client supports it, you can even write down all their different social media and instant messaging handles. If you have trouble putting names to faces, you can add a photo.

Sorry for all the standards links there. I know it's all shockingly dull at best, and overwhelming at worst. But the point is to show that there are so many options, and the right tools can do so much!

Picking a rolodex

The first thing about picking a digital rolodex is that you probably already have one! Most operating systems come with one, though they are of varying quality.¹ They also may make it hard to avoid web lock-in, so if you have privacy concerns it can be better to go elsewhere. Every vCard system has a basic setup that is largely the same: You have fields for name, email, phone number, web links, and possibly IM or social media platforms, and then a general field for notes.

• Platform-bundled:
  • Apple Contacts
  • Google Contacts
  • Samsung Contacts
  • KDE Kontact
  • Gnome Contacts
  • PS Vita Mail
• Commercial:
  • Mailspring
• Libre:
  • Mozilla Thunderbird
  • Fossify Contacts
• Nasty:
  • A file folder full of .vcf (vCard) files and grep

My personal recommendation is going to be, as per usual, Mozilla Thunderbird. I can talk about Thunderbird at length, and likely will at some point in the future. It's a one-stop-shop for web communication tools, with a fascinating lineage that goes all the way back to Netscape.

A Better Future

I realize some people are ephemeral, or may not see the need to go these lengths to keep track of people. After all, isn't that what social media is for? But I think that approach is, to be frank, naive. We are in an era of platform collapse, and much like Twitter provided no portability when it transformed into X, we have no reason to believe any other platform is going to grace us with our own exit strategy. If Bluesky finally collapses, the data is allegedly "portable", but only to other Bluesky instances. Will they provide locally-downloadable indexes of everyone you followed? Does Facebook? Does Signal? Does any app? Cohost did, but it was a rarity.

No, of course they won't. Software is not made to help people these days; software is made to capture people in a platform and make sure they don't leave it. Meta does not care about you, or about helping you stay in contact. Meta specifically does not want you contacting people outside of Meta. Of course they won't give you an exit strategy! Silicon valley discovered, to their horror in the mid 2010s, that personal computing was solved. There was no reason to ever buy new software ever again. So they worked to dismantle the nature of software. To trap us all in apps that we can never be free of, to eradicate file systems and protocols in favor of "RESTful" "APIs" and bespoke proprietary ecosystems.

It was about two years since the last time my ex texted me, and I swapped phones and platforms a couple times since then. But I dragged my vCard file from one device to the next, and when they texted me I saw their cat icon and immediately knew it was them. When my cousin emails me for the first time in three years I know its them, because even though I don't use Google Contacts any more my vCard files in Thunderbird still inform me who that is. The information is mine, in my hands, and in my control.

We can take back computers and make them usable for people again. We just need to learn about what they tried to take from us.

Addtional Notes

1. I'm excluding Microsoft Exchange and Windows Contacts here, because they are generally really bad at portability, and it is a nightmare to extract your data from their software.