Your contacts are often scattered across
multiple email accounts and social sites. For instance, you may have switched
to Gmail but some of your contacts may still be stored in the old address books
of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Then there are places like Facebook and LinkedIn that
store personal and professional details of your contacts (including profile
pictures) but fetching this information into your main address book is often a
tricky thing.
One Place
for all your Contacts
If you find it a hassle to maintain multiple
address books, a possible solution is that you consolidate them all into a
single cloud-based service like Google Contacts.
Here are some ideas on how you may go about doing
this:
Step 1:
Bring all address books into Google Contacts
Go to Gmail Settings and click the “Import Mail and
Contacts” button to bring all the existing contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail,
Gmail, Google Apps, and your other email accounts into Google Contacts.
Next download your address books from LinkedIn,
Facebook, Outlook,Orkut and other accounts as CSV files and import them all
into Google Contacts one-by-one.
Step 2:
Clean-up the duplicates
When you import contacts from multiple places, it
is obvious that some of the entries would be duplicates of each other. Google
Contacts however makes it quite easy for you to manage these duplicates.
Choose “Find Duplicates” under “My Contacts” and
the tool will group all the entries that share the same name. Do remember to
review all the default suggestions one-by-one as sometimes two people in your
contact list can have similar names and you don’t want to combine them into
one. Once you’re ready, just hit the Merge button.
Google Contacts Manager mostly relies on the
person’s name to detect duplicate entries. If it fails to recognize all your
duplicate contacts, you can merge them manually as shown in the next screenshot.
Step 3:
Enrich your contacts data
Google Contacts now has basic details of all your
contacts including their names, email addresses and, in some cases, phone
numbers and birthdays. We are however still missing profile pictures, website
URLs, social profiles, etc.
There’s a useful online service called Gist that
may help bring lot of such additional profile details into our Google Contacts.
Here’s how:
3a. Go to gist.com and open a
free account.
3b. Once your account is
activated, go to “Other Contacts” and connect Google Contacts with Gist. Type
your Gmail username and click “Authorize and Upload” – this uses OAuth so you
can upload your entire Google address book into Gist without sharing your credentials.
3c. Now that all your contacts
have been imported (see the progress bar at the top), go to gist.com/people and
you’ll find that Gist has discovered tons of extra information about your
contacts that weren’t available in your original address book. This includes
their blog addresses, social URLs and more.
Let’s now bring this new information back into
Google Contacts. Select all the contacts, click Export and Gist will send you a
single vCard file in your Inbox.
Download this v-Card file and import it into your
Google Contacts. Don’t worry, it will only merge the new details and
won’t create any duplicate contacts.
The next thing that we are missing in Google
Contacts are profile pictures. There’s a utility called Google
Contacts Sync that takes your Gmail (or Google Apps) credentials, finds the
matching entries in your Facebook network and accordingly updates their profile
pictures and birthdays in Google Contact.
If you are not connected with all your Google
contacts on Facebook, you can still bring their profile pictures through
RainMaker. This is an excellent service that can populate your Google
Contacts entries with photos and social details pulled from Facebook, Twitter
and LinkedIn. The free account will however limit you to 25 contacts.
To summarize, we first imported all our address
books into Google Contacts, merged the duplicates and then added profile
pictures and social details of our contacts.
What next? If you have a smartphone like the
iPhone, Nokia (Symbian), BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, you can use Google
Mobile Sync to keep your Google Contacts synchronized with the built-in address
book application. Android mobile phones have this built-in so your phone’s
address book will always be in sync with Google Contacts.
