"the problem is that your Google contacts aren’t always your contacts: they’re mostly a bunch of people automatically added by Gmail because you replied to their messages.”

Bloody hell thats so true.. I have given up actually clean up my Contact list ..google can surly do a better job at list mngt ..

My biggest problem with Google's services is their miserable contact management – maybe now a third party will let you do it better.

I'm always amazed you shows up on my google talk online list......have to look into who they are......someone I randomly emailed with.

I will be so happy if this spawns a Windows Mobile app to sync my gmail contacts to my phone!

you might also have noticed you can access your google contacts in a separate window, using this url :
https://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager
which is useful to access your contact from anywhere if you create a bookmarklet :
javascript:void((function(){window.open("https:
//mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager",
"GContactsWindow","status=no,toolbar=no,width=600,
height=600,resizable=yes");})());

I think it could also be added to any page through a greasemonkey script creating an iframe, but have no time to fix all bugs around this :
- call from another domain is returning a 403 error
- problems with iframes z-index
- ...

Hmm. this is fantastic, now if i have time or someone else can develop a sync method with the iphone addressbook and Google Contacts via the API.

"the problem is that your Google contacts aren’t always your contacts: they’re mostly a bunch of people automatically added by Gmail because you replied to their messages.”

Well.. I don't know what your definition of contact is, but that above is mine. If you don't want to communicate with somebody, why send them email?

Veky, I want to communcicate (reply) to a Listserver, (aka DL) , is that a contact I

secondly , there are times you have a 1 off respond to something .. a simple "Thank you" to an email .. now does that Shoeless Joe and JavaJane become a contact to me and if so why ??

> If you don't want to communicate with somebody,
> why send them email?

Here's a real-world offline example (based on a true story):

I phoned a company for a spare part needed to fix my toilet. I'm not going to add their phone number to my mobile phone's contacts / address book because I'm never going to phone them ever again.

Transfer that scenario online:

I email a company for a spare part needed to fix my toilet. They get automatically added to my Gmail contacts. That's not right.

Perhaps Google should auto-complete using any email address you've ever used (a bit like using your last dialled numbers list on a mobile phone) but only ever add people to your contacts who you explicitly add.

Or maybe a reader sends me an email thinking I work for Google and I reply him that I don't.

Or maybe I need to send an email to unsubscribesomecompany.com to unsubscribe from an uninteresting newsletter.

one advantage of that auto add to contacts is that from the time I answered a mail to someone this person gets on the spam filter white list.

Seems to me from reading the API documentation, that you could use to one way sync your Outlook contacts to Google.

If this was setup to repeat say every 120 minutes (like the new Gmail/Outlook calendar tool) then it would scrub out the junk contacts Gmail puts in for me.

This would be the method of controlling who I want as a contact and not who Google thinks I want

How about Google Health API. We have Patient Health Record solutions and wish to integrate it with Google health or health vault. We want to make it possible that patient holding Google health can export / import data to our solution to process it further.

Quote: “Hopefully, social applications will use this API instead of asking for your Gmail credentials and we’ll see synchronization utilities for mobile devices, Outlook etc."

Eh... Am I reading this correctly. Does it say that social apps can access my contacts without my credentials??!?!

Terji: Not exactly. That API allows social (and other) apps to access your contacts only after you gave them permission after entering your credentials in a form hosted by Google. Until now the form were hosted by the app itself, allowing them to know your user and password (if they're evil enough).