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!