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Posts: 186 | Thanked: 16 times | Joined on Nov 2009 @ Austin TX
#1
Is there a Brainstorm to help improve the managing of contacts from multiple sources?
I have 200 MSN
470 Facebook
600 Phonebook contacts. Many of these are the same people jsut with multiple accounts.
Everytime I add a new VoIP/ IM protocol it adds seperate entries for each contact.

Is there a way to have it match on first & last name so that it automatically merges the contacts so I don't have a 1270 entry contacts list with duplicates. Its a little daunting trying to merge 470 contacts manually.

Last edited by Strive_Masiwa; 2010-02-09 at 20:23.
 
jsuggs's Avatar
Posts: 103 | Thanked: 44 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Nashville, TN
#2
I'll second the request for this...
 
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Posts: 2,669 | Thanked: 2,555 times | Joined on Apr 2007 @ Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
#3
Might want to look up the incredible Hermes app which was made for exactly this reason.
 
Posts: 186 | Thanked: 16 times | Joined on Nov 2009 @ Austin TX
#4
I LOVE Hermes. it is great but just pulls picture website & birthday data from Facebook (& twitter ?) as far as I know. This is great for updating already existing contacts in the contacts app (provided the names match of course). If you have more than 1 contact with same First & Last name Hermes does not merge them.

What I am talking about here is slightly different (an extension of that really).

We need a smart merge utility that looks at the first & last names in the contact list & merges them wherever there is a match. So that these 3 seperate entries:
1. Skype name John Smith
2. MSN IM: John Smith
3. Facebook IM: John Smith

become just one entry:
1. John Smith
Skype: John.smith
MSN: johnsmith@live.com
FB: JSmith@yahoo.com

Currently you have to find John Smith in your contact list then select all his seperate entries in the phone book to merge them.
And then go & do the same thing for James Smith and Jim Smith as well.
 

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Posts: 103 | Thanked: 44 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Nashville, TN
#5
@Strive - Exactly

Additionally, this could lessen the pain for when contacts do "unmerge" as well.
 
Posts: 186 | Thanked: 16 times | Joined on Nov 2009 @ Austin TX
#6
Yeah the "un-merge" issue is very inconvenient.

So should we start a brainstorm for this proposed utility?

I am not skilled to develop the solution but can volunteer to handle all the project admin if need be.
 
Posts: 10 | Thanked: 2 times | Joined on Jan 2010
#7
my 2 cents

I see the unmerge issue as a bug that needs to be solved.

I imported my contacts from N95 and added a few Social Networks and patiently merged all my contacts. This is quite stable until you add/remove more contact sources, when you start getting dups.

When the contacts are imported, a new contact should only be created if it's "ID" is not present as field in any other contact. So if I already have a contact with a GTalk field of "John.Doe@gmail.com" in my John Doe contact, a new one should not be created when I the GTalk contacts are imported.

Other annoying thing, but this is specific of MSN plugins, it that each version (Haze, Pecan, Butterfly) use a different field ID, getting even more duplicates if you try another plugin. They all should share the same MSN tag and use the principle above.

Last edited by Hangas; 2010-02-09 at 23:11.
 

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Posts: 186 | Thanked: 16 times | Joined on Nov 2009 @ Austin TX
#8
All valid points I have experienced issues with. So sounds like there is definately a need for an enhanced merge utility.

Any developers want to take a stab at it?
 
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Posts: 47 | Thanked: 28 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ London, UK
#9
Auto-matching just on names is dangerous - how many John Smith's are out there?
Auto-matching on something unique (eg, email address) should be fine.

Perhaps have a new 'proposed matches' screen with a simple interface to manually approve each match to speed up the matching?


Another thing I personally would really like to see is that IM contacts do NOT automatically become an Address Book contact. I'd prefer to only import IM contact details for contacts I already have since I have a LOT of casual IM contacts which I don't want cluttering up my 'real' address book, but don't want to delete either.

Perhaps a way to solve this is via multiple address books, or address book groups / tags.

Should only be a fairly simple change at the database level - add 'Groups' and 'Group_Members' tables. Would, of course, need a fair amount of GUI work to support.


eg.
John Smith (Standard Address Book): (Manually added / sync'd from another device)
Phone #
Address
<whatever>

John Smith (MSN): (Auto-imported from IM plugin)
Msn ID

John Smith (Email): (Auto-imported from email app)
Email Address

John Smith (...), etc.


John Smith: (After merge, full contact card displayed irrespective of which Group is currently selected)
Phone #
Address
Msn ID
Email Address
<whatever>


As well as these auto-generated groups, a user could create custom groups (Friends, Colleagues, ...) and manually add contacts to them.


This way a user could select a group (Standard, MSN, EMail) and only display contacts matching that group. A particular contact could, of course, be in multiple groups. Of course there'd also be a meta-group 'All' which is effectively what we have now.


Something like this would actually be a useful Address Book!
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Posts: 276 | Thanked: 224 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Frankfurt, Germany
#10
You can vote for this bug: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8849
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MOD-Package: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42415
 
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