Hacker News Reader

Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

Color me unimpressed. I've found myself degenerating to simpler address books as my online life get's more complex.

As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare.

I recently uninstalled Facebook from my phone because of the whole address book fiasco. I'm back to a simple list of contacts that I know personally - and it's great.

I'm probably just being a Luddite. I want an address book so I can quickly call Ted. Not so I can wade through all my Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, <Insert Social Service> friends while attempting to call Ted.

View on HN

As Herb Simon wrote (in 1971!) "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".

The problem you describe is that "smart" address books are actually quite dumb-- they don't understand the context. When you're just trying to call Ted, you don't really care how many mutual friends you have. The solution is actually well-known in the literature for a long time: focus+context (and relatedly overview +details on demand). Show the caller an easy way to get to Ted's number, stat. The rest is just context, which should really only be shown when the user wants to know more about Ted.

Side thought: maybe, what would be useful are phones that guess who you want to call. Instead of the "most recent" list on a phone, maybe you want a "most likely to call now".

If it has a guess for "most likely to call now", go ahead and give it a "I'm feeling lucky" button.

And speaking of Google, they have a "Gesture Search" app that I use all the time to find contacts which I don't think will be on the top of the recent calls list. Usually it doesn't take more than one poorly drawn character at the start of someone's name to have them near the top of the result list. Search, don't sort, and all that.

>As a perfect example, the first thing I did when I got a smartphone was hook it up to Facebook. Then I discovered a thousand useless Facebook contacts had been downloaded into my address book. Finding people who I actually wanted to call or text became a nightmare.

That is a feature that can be disabled, for one.

For two, every address book platform supports partitioning contacts by category. For instance, i'm a member of the HN G+ circle. Those thousands of contacts don't pollute my usual view because my personal contacts are in another book, which I have set as the default view on my phone.

Well, I use a Windows Phone (which I love) but this is one of the features of a WP7 that you can't disable. At least I've been unable to find a way to disable it.

So I'll concede that in this scenario it may simply be a failure of the platform and not Facebook/Address Books in general. But I think my core point stands.

I used Windows Phone until recently, and I'm almost 100% sure there is an option to change this, because I didn't have the issue myself. All my Facebook contacts were in my address book, but not in the default display. They only appeared when I searched.

I guess I'm just incompetent then =) Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out when I get a chance.

In the people app you can choose what online accounts to display in the options for the people app.

Then, I would like to receive your feedback about a more elaborated concept that I am working on: Egont. The idea is to filter and build your own rules and control your data using a data flow language. Some thoughts on

http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-...

http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/

This problem already seems to be solved- my Facebook app is set to only sync with existing contacts. Much simpler.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com