Pssst, Need an Inside Contact at a Big Company?

Ever want to do business with a big company but didn't know who to call? It's not like you can just call the operator and say, "Let me talk to the guy who'll buy 100,000 of my home-made widgets!" Yeah, that'll work.

Jigsaw offers an intriguing answer: It's a mammoth database of names, addresses, and phone numbers (within businesses only), supplied and updated by the users of the service. If you have a pile of other people's business cards on your desk (I have about 6,000... I know you must have a few, too), you can supply other people's contact information in exchange for access to the site. If you don't want to type in a bunch of phone numbers, you can simply pay $25 a month for access.

The bottom line is that Jigsaw provides a white pages where one has never existed before: For the largely unlisted directories of phone numbers inside the country's biggest companies.

If you're an executive recruiter or in business development, you are hopefully signed up for Jigsaw already. If you just need an occasional contact, you can probably get by with the trial service or by providing the occasional contact record in exchange for a few in return.

As for how well it works, the answer is not bad. There are thousands of contacts for some companies, but because people tend to stay at their jobs briefly, get promoted, or move to new offices, this information can be out of date. Also, last time I checked, Yahoo! didn't have six CEOs (none of which is the company's actual CEO).

Others have raised the question of privacy on the site and whether the whole thing isn't just a terrible idea. I'm on the fence. Frankly I don't mind if someone calls me to offer a million-dollar-a-year job (sorry, Yahoo!), but I do mind if I start getting telemarketing calls when I'm on the job. How do you feel about Jigsaw?