Thursday, October 29, 2015

Google Contacts Beta

Dear Google Friends,

The new Contact interface is terrible. Please understand that I'm a strong advocate for Google - some would call me a fanboy. I really want Google to succeed and to demonstrate that a corporation can grow large and successful without turning to evil. rolodex

BUT -- the new contacts subsystem is terrible. It's sluggish, it's inconvenient, it's often inexplicable, and it's absolutely NOT an improvement on the very functional and completely satisfactory predecessor that was once integrated with Gmail.
My warning to Google is: Do not under any circumstances, roll this into the Google Apps product -- it's just fine if you piss off the free users and try to coerce them into adopting Google Plus. But for those of us who use Google Apps at work, it will be gigantic embarrassment for you if this becomes the contact management system that begins to appear there.

Often I will search and not find people who are very clearly in my personal contact base. (Note: Focus of the search should prioritize results from the personal contact base above all others) Usually my search string will not bring useful results as I type (in contradiction to the performance standard of most other integrated search services) and clearly the focus is to favor results that come from Google Plus before those that are driven by data in my Gmail archive and personal contact base.

This may be something you have to roll back - but otherwise, you need to break out NYPD grade cattle prods and get engineers working on an update that really works.

Hope it works out well for you. I have to confess that I've already begun to explore data liberation options to allow me to get my contact base into a system that works for me.

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