Gmail Contacts: New and Improved

Gmail has finally made some long-awaited improvements to their Contacts system.  It seems they have been on a tear lately, with new features rolling out almost daily.

Yesterday, they unveiled four new improvements.  Here’s a quick summary:

1. Contact merge
Many of you will remember Monday’s blog post about Google Sync which mentioned contact merge. Nothing is more annoying than seeing several copies of, say, “Stephen Fowler” on your iPhone — only one of which actually contained his phone number. You can now just have on “Stephen Fowler” which contains all of his contact data. To do this, select the contacts you want to merge and then click “Merge these”.

2. All Contacts
Instead of Suggested Contacts, there is now a group called All Contacts which is where all of your contacts reside (and thus a good view for merging duplicate contacts). You can still see suggested contacts by clicking the “View Suggestions” button from My Contacts. From there, you can select frequently emailed contacts to add to My Contacts.

3. Remove people from My Contacts
You can finally move your contacts out of the My Contacts group.  This is especially useful if you’re planning to sync your contact list to your phone.  Cut out the contacts that you don’t want synced to your phone from My Contacts (click “Groups” and then “Remove from My Contacts”), and they won’t get synced.

4. Search across all contact fields (hooray!)
Contact search now (thankfully) works much better.  Instead of just searching contact names and email addresses, it now includes phone numbers, notes fields, and mailing addresses as well.

Enjoy playing around with the new features. I know I will.

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