Google, Contacts, and their API

March 6, 2008 by 2 Comments

Google has announced an API for their Contacts system, which offers up a bunch of possibilities for contact management and the use of a Google contact list by third-party applications. Yay for an API and the ability to share data.

That said, I find Google’s contacts system damn near useless. Why? Noise. Why is it noisy? Because Google has decided that everyone that I ever send an e-mail to (either new or reply) should be a contact. Between managing several blogs, participating in online communities, and working with my photography on some new ventures, I get a lot of e-mail and send lots of messages and replies… many of which are one- or two-time situations involving someone I will never contact or associate with again.

I’m sure it’s designed as an ease of use feature, but there are better ways. Put a “quick add to contacts” button on Gmail to make it manual. Or make it a user-configurable option in the Gmail preferences. Lumping everyone from “people I email several times a day” to “some random guy who told me a link was broken” into one bucket makes that bucket difficult to carry.

[tags]google, contacts, api, googlecontacts, gmail[/tags]

Filed Under: General Info, Social Media ·
  • http://www.mikemcbrideonline.com Mike McBride

    It’s interesting, no one likes the fact that they add everyone to your contacts. I know I don’t, but I sure like being able to click a name in my contacts list and see all the conversations I’ve had with that person. I think the easiest way to give you a way to look at conversations by person, was to link it to your contacts folder, and the only way to assure you saw all your conversations there, was to automatically add everyone you sent email to.

    So, in order to meet both of these requirements, they’d have to create yet another place to link conversations by name while leaving contacts as just a contacts folder. Or they could simply give up the idea of showing you conversations tracked by who you emailed to when that person isn’t a contact. I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that, but this might help explain why they made what seems like a very illogical design decision…

  • http://www.anotherblogger.com Aaron B. Hockley

    Good point Mike. I hadn’t thought about that feature because honestly I never use it. I don’t think about it… when I need to find email or conversations involving someone I type their name in the seach box and find it via search.

    But you bring up an interesting point… for folks that use that feature, it probably makes a lot of sense.