I was wished a Happy Birthday yesterday by a friend (who will not be named) and I noticed that the greeting came “via SocialCaddy.”  Ever the inquisitive one, I had to check it out.  The folks at SocialCaddy have created a service to help you “be a better friend.”

The service, built on the Google AppEngine and Erlust, boasts, “SocialCaddy lets you manage your universe of friends and business contacts automatically & for free. It is the assistant you always dreamed of.  Only better.”

In a nutshell, it sends “Happy Birthday” or some other custom message to your facebook, LinkedIn and/or Gmail contacts on their birthday etc.  You can designate these contacts in terms of their priority, Low, Medium, High.

The real power comes in being a centralized contact database.  It imports all the pertinent information and has it all there in a nice format.  This saves you a boatload of time entering this info in a database or looking it up when you need it.

As a business tool, it makes a lot sense – assuming the Borg-like collection of your information is not used for nefarious purposes.

As a personal tool, it seems like it could take the social out of social networking.  If used prudently however, it can be useful there as well.

Will I be using my SocialCaddy robot to handle some tasks for me?  Sure, that is my job – to stay ahead of these things.  I will let you know how it turns out.