Saturday, June 25, 2011

Gmail Contacts - not very impressive

Messing with contacts today.  Imported some from Apple Address book.  It was easy for me, but a newb would have had to click through to instructions, it didn't just pop up and offer to connect to the address book and import the contacts.

Then I was working on Sorting.  By First Name or by Last Name, but no Show by First Name, Sort by Last Name option.  I moved into the Business tab and found all my Businesses sorted by Last Name, so Papa Murphy's was now Murphy's, Papa and Pizza Guys was transformed into Guys, Pizza.  Obviously this was confusing, so I tried to switch the sorting back, only to be greeted by this error:

the error was confusing and didn't add much to my user experience.

Also I'm pretty sure I don't have individual sort options based upon group, which means my businesses will always be this way (or maybe I'll have to edit them by hand to change their field to business from First Last.  I also had to manually fix the phone number formats, which was annoying.  555-555-5555 should always convert to (555) 555-5555 even if it's in the format I was using for Skype +1555-555-5555)

Also my contacts have no photos.  How about an option to import them from Facebook?  (or even Google Profile, which I know you'd rather push instead)  (could also import Phone Numbers, Birthdays, anything else that facebook has.  We have all these social networks and all these APIs, but is there a way for the truly common man to leverage them?  For example, I love RunKeeper, but I really want the Distance and Date recorded on my Google Calendar and right now I'm doing it by hand.  Do I have to wait until Google buys Runkeeper or Facebook buys Runkeeper to get this kind of simple sharing functionality?  Seems like a nobrainer.)

The contacts list is too small, doesn't seem to have any good sorting options and seems much more like an old fashion email contacts manager rather than a full fledged contacts manager/social network type page that I think you need it to be.

(now back to manually transferring Birthday information from my Birthday Calendar (imported to Gcal from Ical) into Contacts so that it will show up on Calendar and I'll only have one calendar.  Who says I don't do important things?)

PS: I am really impressed by the persistant hilighting.  You need to find a way to tell people about it, because it does cause a bit of a use change when the computer stops forgetting what you were doing and makes list making easy instead of tedious and stressful.

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