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.
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
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.
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.
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!
