I have around 30 normal contacts on my phone but after adding my AIM account into Conversations it combined 300+ AIM contacts into the Contacts app. How am I ever going to find just the people who I want to call when now the list is full of 300+ people??

Is there something I'm not doing right? I tried selecting the "Groups" option but it only has an option for AIM and not anything else. Sorting by recent almost solves the problem.

You can type to filter in the Contacts application, but this issue could use some looking into.

As far as dealing with having 300 screen names in your contacts list I'm not sure, I've been too lazy to deal with it, lol. Most of the people I talk to on AIM I also have contact cards for, so I just merged the info. Creating real contact cards would be one option. I'm not sure if theres a way you can make it not add the screen names to Contacts. I will mess with it later but I'm guessing once they've been added removing your AIM account won't remove all the contacts it created either.

That's correct. I think the assumed use-case is one where you (A) have a more sane number of IM contacts, or (B) have most of them merged. As mentioned, you can type to filter from the contacts app - or just start typing from the home screen. And yes, if you delete (or disable) the AIM account, at most it should remove the AIM-specific info. However, I think that if the contact was pulled from the AIM account, and not merged/modified (e.g. only an AIM contact), then it might remove those.

you should always keep in mind, that if you delete the contacts from your phone book, they'll be deleted from the server, too..
at least in skype and icq this is the case, can't tell surely for aim, but i don't think it differs per service...

thanks for reminding me that I can start typing a contact from the home screen to get their info. This will save me a lot of time. I think a nice feature they should add in the Contacts app right above the first contact is a drop down list or something to filter which group you want to see. Normal contacts should be a group, AIM should be a separate one. And obviously other options if you have other accounts set up

You can also open the phone app and choose "Select contact" and it will only show contacts with a phone number set, just like the IM conversations contact list will only show people who've been added from an IM service.