Comments on: Gmail’s contact management is the pits

By: Nicole

Nicole — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:08:27 +0000

finally someone else agrees! i hate the gmail contact manager too. not intuitive in the least. try using a different contact manager that seamlessly brings in contact info from webmail accounts and that does a much better job at making sense of your huge contact list than Gmail. i like OctopusCity.com, which is a free site, for contact management and the free sync, as well as the business networking community that’s tied in as well.

By: Contact Management Woes

Contact Management Woes — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:17:00 +0000

brought up on the yahoo invisibility tradition, my problem is, gmail just doesnt show the “invisible” option in the drop down on my laptop! (it does on my PC). a bug perhaps?

By: Anna

Anna — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:57:43 +0000

I too have lost faith in the almighty google. While the gmail contact manager seems to have worked some of its kinks out, the same contact manager in GoogleApps is still pretty primitive. Groups/labels can’t be exported or imported, the program is extremely slow to load and edit anything if you have a large contact list, there is no easy way to select multiple contacts without having to check the boxes one at a time (no shift key feature), many labels that I attached to a large number of contacts were actually somehow UNDONE (i think due to the slow loading of scripts on the page), and the list goes on.
There are no mentions of any of these limitations anywhere and it’s wasted a lot of my time trying to save my work and contacts from being completely messed up. I don’t understand why they would hail the new GoogleApps as being so new and improved but forget to actually update the programs that they already fixed in the regular gmail applications.
Grrr!

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:06:51 +0000

I never could find a decent contact management program that I liked, so I was forced to write my own. I use it extensively at work, and at home, and in my business.

You can download Super Rolodex 5.1 from download.com at this link:
http://www.download.com/Super-Rolodex/3000-2065_4-10784305.html

Or you can download it right from my website here:
http://www.primesales.net/SuperRolodex/DownLoadNow.html

By: strom

strom — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:15:19 +0000

Here are Tristan Louis' extended comments on contact management.

By: Personal Relationship Manager

Personal Relationship Manager — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:14:30 +0000

[...] was recently describing my update process to David Strom, after he had posted an entry on his blog about how poor the contact management system in Gmail was, and I hit upon a realization: A lot of the work that goes into keeping all that information up to [...]

By: strom

strom — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:57:39 +0000

After this post made its rounds through Google, I spoke to Keith Coleman, Gmail’s Product Manager, late last Friday. Coleman basically agreed with my major points and told me that they have completely rewrote the Gmail code base to bring it more in line with other Google apps, and to share a common data repository for contacts. They are working on fixes to the problems that I mentioned and hopefully will have them posted soon. He also recommended that Mac users use Safari instead of Firefox because of speed improvements. I was encouraged that a) they actually wanted to talk to me and b) seem to be trying hard to make the changes. I suggested that they do a better job of making users aware of the limitations that I mentioned in my post and hopefully will hear from them when they have fixed some of the issues.

By: strom

strom — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:48:55 +0000

One of my readers writes:

or it could be that they will eventually work on a solid contact management system… FYI, I use plaxo + the mac address book (one can do the same with outlook) + google + AIM + Facebook (using FacebookSync on the mac) + LinkedIn + etc to maintain my contact list… While not as impressive as yours, I have a respectable 1500+ current people in mine of which about 80% is known to be correct. I do see the value of groups in gmail (as I’m starting to host my own mail using google apps for your domain) but I think ultimately, what one needs is a decent personal CRM type of app.

Ultimately, a good contact management solution ought to integrate the following:
- Contact Info with every field searchable
- Related emails so one can track data with a contact
- Related IMs for the same reason
- A notes section to add notes for related calls, face to face meetings, etc…
- Possibly related linkage on social networks

This would be kind of a killer app, in my view and I found that most current solutions fall very short of that!