Smart Contacts Merging???
 

Is there a Brainstorm to help improve the managing of contacts from multiple sources?
I have 200 MSN
470 Facebook
600 Phonebook contacts. Many of these are the same people jsut with multiple accounts.
Everytime I add a new VoIP/ IM protocol it adds seperate entries for each contact.

Is there a way to have it match on first & last name so that it automatically merges the contacts so I don't have a 1270 entry contacts list with duplicates. Its a little daunting trying to merge 470 contacts manually.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

I'll second the request for this...

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

Might want to look up the incredible Hermes app which was made for exactly this reason.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

I LOVE Hermes. it is great but just pulls picture website & birthday data from Facebook (& twitter ?) as far as I know. This is great for updating already existing contacts in the contacts app (provided the names match of course). If you have more than 1 contact with same First & Last name Hermes does not merge them.

What I am talking about here is slightly different (an extension of that really).

We need a smart merge utility that looks at the first & last names in the contact list & merges them wherever there is a match. So that these 3 seperate entries:
1. Skype name John Smith
2. MSN IM: John Smith
3. Facebook IM: John Smith

become just one entry:
1. John Smith
Skype: John.smith
MSN: johnsmith@live.com
FB: JSmith@yahoo.com

Currently you have to find John Smith in your contact list then select all his seperate entries in the phone book to merge them.
And then go & do the same thing for James Smith and Jim Smith as well.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

@Strive - Exactly

Additionally, this could lessen the pain for when contacts do "unmerge" as well.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

Yeah the "un-merge" issue is very inconvenient.

So should we start a brainstorm for this proposed utility?

I am not skilled to develop the solution but can volunteer to handle all the project admin if need be.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

my 2 cents

I see the unmerge issue as a bug that needs to be solved.

I imported my contacts from N95 and added a few Social Networks and patiently merged all my contacts. This is quite stable until you add/remove more contact sources, when you start getting dups.

When the contacts are imported, a new contact should only be created if it's "ID" is not present as field in any other contact. So if I already have a contact with a GTalk field of "John.Doe@gmail.com" in my John Doe contact, a new one should not be created when I the GTalk contacts are imported.

Other annoying thing, but this is specific of MSN plugins, it that each version (Haze, Pecan, Butterfly) use a different field ID, getting even more duplicates if you try another plugin. They all should share the same MSN tag and use the principle above.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

All valid points I have experienced issues with. So sounds like there is definately a need for an enhanced merge utility.

Any developers want to take a stab at it?

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

Auto-matching just on names is dangerous - how many John Smith's are out there?
Auto-matching on something unique (eg, email address) should be fine.

Perhaps have a new 'proposed matches' screen with a simple interface to manually approve each match to speed up the matching?


Another thing I personally would really like to see is that IM contacts do NOT automatically become an Address Book contact. I'd prefer to only import IM contact details for contacts I already have since I have a LOT of casual IM contacts which I don't want cluttering up my 'real' address book, but don't want to delete either.

Perhaps a way to solve this is via multiple address books, or address book groups / tags.

Should only be a fairly simple change at the database level - add 'Groups' and 'Group_Members' tables. Would, of course, need a fair amount of GUI work to support.


eg.
John Smith (Standard Address Book): (Manually added / sync'd from another device)
Phone #
Address
<whatever>

John Smith (MSN): (Auto-imported from IM plugin)
Msn ID

John Smith (Email): (Auto-imported from email app)
Email Address

John Smith (...), etc.


John Smith: (After merge, full contact card displayed irrespective of which Group is currently selected)
Phone #
Address
Msn ID
Email Address
<whatever>


As well as these auto-generated groups, a user could create custom groups (Friends, Colleagues, ...) and manually add contacts to them.


This way a user could select a group (Standard, MSN, EMail) and only display contacts matching that group. A particular contact could, of course, be in multiple groups. Of course there'd also be a meta-group 'All' which is effectively what we have now.


Something like this would actually be a useful Address Book!

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

You can vote for this bug: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8849

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

Agreed (even though I have no 2 entries that match exactly on FirstName+LastName).
I am not sure what unique key could be used other than FirstName+LastName. It has to be something that is commonly used in all the protocols. I am not sure people use the same email address for msn as yahoo as ICQ as FB chat. Thats why I suggested FirstName+LastName. More matches (at east on my contacts list) that way.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

This bug was "un-merged":D. Here is the current one:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6859

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

I would still prefer to manually merge contacts where there is no uniquely identifying field than merge two (or more) completely unrelated contacts just based on having the same name. Automatic functionality should only ever kick in when there is no chance of it going wrong.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

I agree with the manual merge. I have merged quite a few Outlook and IM contacts only to have multiple occurrences of the same item such as a mobile number - one with the international code at the front (from Skype) and one without (from Outlook). It is frustrating as I get a huge list of potential numbers to call/SMS/Skype whenever I open a contact window and in many cases they are the same numbers.

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

I just added facebook chat using jabber http://thenokiablog.com/2010/02/10/h...ut-of-the-box/

and this doubled my about 900 contacts. All doubles have the same lastname firstname format!

A merge by name is a must feature!!! Aaargh!

Re: Easy Contacts Merging???
 

I don't think auto merge on name is worth it. And it's dangerous.

I have 3 different persons with the same name. And two of them are co-workers. (A middle name field would also be nice for this one, but that's a different story).

I don't mind the manual merge, as long as I only have to do it once!

But somehow the facebook plugin keeps un-merging random contacts.

Also the auto add contact when you send an email for a new email address is quite annoying.