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On your Gmail Connection page you state that Gmail creates a contact for anyone you have ever emailed. Gmail now separates contacts into My Contacts and Suggested Contacts (which are all contacts ever emailed) so this is no longer correct.
Does Soocial sync with My Contacts or Suggested Contacts?
I’m
Curious
Does the sync with Gmail account for new My Contacts versus Suggested Contacts?
Promoted
Response
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I’m
hoping people will report this issue to google along with us
Hi Rob,
Yeah sorry about that, this is Stefan
and he answered it wrong. Our sincerest apologies.
We, Soocial, currently have *no* way of distinguishing between "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts" with the tools Google makes available to us. For this reason we've implemented the poor-mans filter I described earlier and also why we're eager for Google to make the "My Contacts" set available to us for synchronisation.
Sorry for the confusion, leave your comment at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues... to notify Google of this issue.
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EMPLOYEE
I’m
glad you caught that...
Hi Jed.
We currently sync with all GMail contacts. GMail recently changed the way they add contact like you mention in your question.
Thanks for that catch, we need to update the info on that page.Comment -
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1Thanks for the response. Any chance you can restrict Soocial to only sync Gmail's My Contacts in the near future...or make it configurable?
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We are working on a more advanced filter system where you have total control over what contacts are synced and which aren't.
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I agree to jd, I don't want to sync Google Suggested Contacts.
Thanks. -
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1Yes, this would be an important change. I thought it would only sync with my contacts, and now I have loads of useless addresses in my address book. -
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This feature would definitely make this a killer app for me.
I need soocial to do one thing: sync my gmail to my mac address book. That's all. CSV files just don't cut it. But I don't want all the gmail suggested addresses junking up my mac. -
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I’m
very very sad
I actually don't think I can use soocial if it is going to clutter up my other address books with gmail suggested addresses....? -
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EMPLOYEE
I’m
happy and confident with the way we've solved it.
Rob, we filter out contacts that GMail has to only sync those contacts that have an email address AND at least a name or company name. This filters out all the suggested contacts that are not wanted. It's true that GMail changed the way they add new contacts to put them in the Suggested Contacts, but most users still have hundreds of unwanted contacts in their normal list from before the change - hence we still have to filter them.
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I’m
confused that Stefan really doesn't get this.
OK... I think that rob from new york will take the initiative and be blunt here. I'm really from new york, so...
Gmail automatically adds contacts with names from the email. I have a contact that Soocial just sync'ed who bought a phone from me on ebay. She is under no circumstances, at all, to be synced anywhere else. She is sync'ed because gmail added her automatically and of course it picked up her first and last name from her email address fields.
Everyone types in their name in their email account setup/settings, thus gmail picks up everyone's first and last name with their email address when executing the auto-add. Thus, I think the logic "we only sync email addresses with a last or company name" is completely faulty because you're syncing 99.9% of email addresses.
Since Gmail now puts these contacts in suggested, Soocial has a method at its disposal to ignore the ebay girl. It is my opinion and it seems to be the opinion of some of the people in this thread that suggested contacts should be ignored. Again my opinion, but this needs to be done yesterday.
Since gmail will move suggested contacts into "my contacts" if I email them frequently, I have an automatic system in place for migrating those new contacts into the Soocial system. Of course, if the only place that contact exists is in my gmail account, I can move them to my contacts manually. The likelihood of a contact ONLY existing in my gmail suggested contacts? Really, that is highly unlikely. Try to come up with an example of someone I am emailing frequently who I want to have access to their email address everywhere else, but I only have their email address... with what method would I be emailing them that I had to look up their email address on my cell phone?
I'm not adverse to syncing a contact with only an email address, but take a step back and objectively assess the average importance of a contact record where the ONLY information you have about the contact is their email address... that's much lower than average. If the ONLY reason they exist as a contact is because you replied to an email they sent you, there is probably a 1 in 500 chance that they should propagate to any other database in your life.
I hope this makes it clear, because I think this is a serious lapse in how the system works. -
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I’m
bewildered!
But now I'm really confused because the ebay girl was added to my suggested contacts yesterday and she is nowhere else to be found in my soocial network.
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Rob, thanks for your elaborate explanation. That does really help in understanding what's going on - sorry if I'm a bit slow sometimes. Please understand that there are many different scenarios and we must understand them all in order to provide a good syncing tool.
Let's make an overview of what's going on, we have three separate issues here:
1. Confusion over how contacts are added to Suggested Contacts
2. Google _used to_ add all contacts directly to your 'My Contacts', that means that existing 'My Contacts' are often still a mess.
3. Soocial should NOT sync with Google's 'Suggested Contacts'.
Number 3 is obvious and that is how we sync now. Soocial does not sync with Google's 'Suggested Contacts' - that is why ebay-girl isn't being synced. (And that is desired behaviour - reading your story, and your second bewildered reply.) So hope that clears part of the problem up.
The confusion about how contacts are added to Suggested Contacts including their name or not has to do with like you say whether or not that information is present. When you reply to an email - Google will add the contact to Suggested Contacts - usually because it's a reply there _WILL_ be a name (as you say because they'll have set it up in their mail prefs) HOWEVER there is also the scenario that you can send an email to someone just by entering their email address - WITHOUT a name. Many users do this and thus their existing Google contacts can be a mess - sometimes up to 4000 incomplete contacts. These incomplete contacts are now added to Suggested Contacts but they used to be added straight to your 'My Contacts' to the frustration of users and of course to us as Soocial as we then needed to find a work around to stop these incomplete and unwanted contacts into the whole Soocial eco-system.
However the issue is more complicated than this as Google used to add your suggest contacts like ebay girl to your contacts and Soocial had no way of distinguishing these apart from the fact that they we're often incomplete. Many GMail users still have a heap of contacts that just have an email addy and no name. These 'meager contacts' will pollute your address books and this is not desired behaviour.
We will be providing users with a lot more control over what does and doesn't get synced in the future - but for now we have to make choices as to what makes sense for most of our users.
Hope this helps you Rob and thanks again for your extensive 'bug/feature' reports.-
Stefan, before your reply above, I don't think we understood #3 to be the case at all. That was the only concern I think any of us had. (I understand the situation was different before the existence of "suggested contacts".)
And since I can't put a feeling on a comment I'll do it manually: I feel super duper happy and I get a fabulous little tingly feeling when I use Soocial! :0 -
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I vote to understood #3 !
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I’m
confident we'll crack this one soon
Hi guys,
Good discussion on the suggested contacts in GMail. Currently we've implemented our own "poor mans" junk filter for Google contacts because Google doesn't allow us to distinguish between "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts" via de API (the mechanism Google makes available for syncing contacts). There is a bug report for this issue at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues..., please leave your comment and that you want this implemented for Soocial. Hopefully that will encourage them to enable this for us.
Our poor mans filter currently rejects contacts that don't have a name or company defined. This works well for random email addresses like support@somedomain.com but in the case of robthecomputerguy and "ebay girl" it fails because the name "ebay girl" is defined for that contact, enabling it to pass through our filter.
Our best bet for fixing this issue is to gently encourage Google to implement access to "My Contacts" via the API.
Thanks for your interest in Soocial and the GMail sync, let us know what your thoughts are on this issue and how we can make Soocial better. -
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I’m
crazy and confused
Simon, according to Stefan's answer above, your post is wrong about the filter (see #3 in his post) and you should delete what you just wrote.
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I’m
hoping people will report this issue to google along with us
Hi Rob,
Yeah sorry about that, this is Stefan and he answered it wrong. Our sincerest apologies.
We, Soocial, currently have *no* way of distinguishing between "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts" with the tools Google makes available to us. For this reason we've implemented the poor-mans filter I described earlier and also why we're eager for Google to make the "My Contacts" set available to us for synchronisation.
Sorry for the confusion, leave your comment at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues... to notify Google of this issue.-
Dammit! As much as I love Google, I'm always disappointed by the way they release information and updates. Those guys could be a bit more responsive...
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I’m
hopeful. We're on a good path.
I thought maybe he did answer it wrong - but ebay girl wasn't propagating... But low and behold, ebay girl did.
By the way, ebay girl isn't ebay girl, she is Kim Pelham... but her email address has her name attached to her.
The temporary fix for me is to disable cell phone syncing for Soocial. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Nokia phones, and I set my phone to NOT sync contacts with only email addresses into my phone's address book. That way ebay girl won't end up in my phone. If ebay girl ends up in the OSX address book for the time being I can deal with it, but I cannot deal with her in my phone.
I understand the difference with the suggested contacts and will go complain to google, but I would beg you to make the highest priority to sync a specific group in Gmail so we can control this. These auto-added contacts are like a virus in the system.
And not that I don't think you have done a decent job with this, you have done the best you can, but we need to take it one step higher.
Even if it means that I have other problems because I only sync gmail with a specific list, I will take those problems over the ebay girl virus.
rob -
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I’m
happy
Hi Rob,
Thanks for your answer and your passionate distaste of the auto-added contacts, I'd appreciate such a passionate post over at the google site too : )
Filtering what contacts are to be synced where is something we'll be working on in the coming few weeks, please do not refrain from speaking your mind on any of these issues. -
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I'd be interested in this as well and have already left a comment on issue 677 at Google's issue tracker. Hopefully they'll change the API soon!
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thanks for helping Soocial by doing that!
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google issue 667 has this final comment:
"Comment 105 by andrew.conkling, Dec 19, 2008
The API supports it (as of December 11), but Apple does not. Please talk to Apple!
Thanks!" - will soocial be able to implement it now? -
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EMPLOYEE
1Gmail did release a new version of the API. It means that we need to reprogram the way we interact with Gmail. So Gmail made it possible finally! Now ewe just need some time to make use of it. We will keep you posted here.- view 2 more comments
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Matt, almost missed your comment. This thread is ancient. Anyway, there was a short issue on our server that made your "my contacts" to be imported and your account to be blocked because of the extra contacts. I have now got it back to syncing and your number is down. If have given you an extra month because it did not sync for almost a month.
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Thanks for turning syncing back on for me. I'm guessing you meant that "Other Contacts" were temporarily being sync'd. Either way, I'm glad it's fixed. :)
Sorry about resurrecting an old thread. I wouldn't normally do that - not sure why I did it this time. -
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Great to hear GMail changed their API - any idea on when this will be implemented? Currently my list is exponentiall growing with people I don't even really now and definitely don't want in my contacts....-
Go to your Suggested Contacts, select all, and delete? I know they'll build up again over time, and certainly this issue should be fixed down the road, but that's not a bad workaround in the meantime. :)
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Well I've now merged all my Suggested Contacts with My Contacts. But there seems to be a problem that every contact that for some reason ended up in Suggested Contacts and was already (how?!) in My Contacts before got all their other details deleted so I needed to look up quite some phone numbers etc again :-(
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Bart, is there already an update on the Suggested Contacts issue? I'm currently seeing al my Suggested Contacts ending up in Soocial unfortunately...
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I’m
just bummed
Damn...I was really hoping this had been solved by now. I'm really waiting for this before I pull the trigger on contact sync with gmail. Please please, shout about it when this gets implemented. -
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I’m
a little bit sad.
Since the new google contacts update I can't delete all my suggested contacts as I used to.
I do have about 300 regular contacts and more than 500 in total - which means I have 200 useless contacts lying around.... please implement the necessary changes! -
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I’m
indifferent
It's been 9 months since the last post here. I still have a lot of "suggested contacts" synced. Any news on this lately? -
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What are the news with Google's new API ?? Isn't it fixed yet ??
I am afraid to sync because of loads of useless suggested contacts.
I would also love to see a different folder inside soocial containing only gmail's contacts.
Thus I could organize them properly without ending up with lots of contacts in my phone -
