Comment by rdegges | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdegges | Hacker News Reader

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I started working as a Developer Evangelist about a year and a half ago, and was having a pretty nasty problem dealing with contacts myself. I keep meeting people all the time, and want some way to:

* Have their contact info auto-imported if I add them as a friend in SOME WAY: either by emailing them, tweeting them, messaging them, whatever.

* Have all my contacts synced into one centralized data store (Google Contacts, in my case).

* Merge and remove duplicate contacts so I don't have to deal with 50 entries of people...

What I ended up settling on is really working well for the past year or so.

I use Google contacts as my primary datastore. I then use FullContact (free): https://www.fullcontact.com/

FullContact will hook into everything, eg: Google / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / etc., grab EVERYONE'S contact info, and merge it into one record, then merge that back into Google contacts =)

Would highly recommend it.

My experience with FullContact was one of constant duplication of data (at both record and field level for both exact and inexact matches. I.E. two contacts representing the same person with say, differences in first name -- Jon vs. Jonathon for example -- would often result in two contacts with a combination of fields from each of the originals. Didn't have to be name. Address, for example. "Road" vs. "Rd" confused the hell out of FullContact routinely...), totally useless features to resolve (in particular) non-exact duplicate matching, and an absolute contempt for any manual curation at all.

Essentially it made mash of my contacts, wouldn't let me correct them either in their UI (with features built exactly for that), and or in any native apps, more than a year on I'm still nowhere near cleaning up the mess.

All they had to say about it was that "synchronizing contacts is a hard problem", or something to that effect. No effort to repair/undo the damage, no suggestions on how to avoid future problems -- sorry we ate your data, sucks to be you.

This is exactly how I manage my contacts. It works super well.

I also started using the full contact mobile carddav sync - which has worked super well.

The card scanner with fullcontact is also nice, but paid.

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