cbolstad's dashboard

cbolstad asked a question in Soocial on January 10, 2009 00:47:

What the heck is the "Soocial Soocial" connection?

What the heck is "Soocial Soocial"?
I have a mystery connection that I didn't add, what is it and where did it come from?

Chris

cbolstad replied on January 10, 2009 00:39 to the idea "Add Plaxo as a Connection for Soocial" in Soocial:

Is this actually implemented or is it just "on the list"? If it is working, how do you do it, I don't see a Plaxo connection?

Chris Bolstad

cbolstad reported a problem in Soocial on December 05, 2008 19:07:

What's up with Gmail's built in groups?

Gmail has several groups that are built in and not able to be deleted (friends, family, co-workers). In addressbook, I created a "Friends" group, it synced to Soocial, and then the correct contacts were added to "friends" in Gmail. But, the next time everything synced, the contact was removed from Friends group in addressbook. It appears that these built in groups in Gmail are not syncing correctly. What's up?

Chris

cbolstad replied on November 22, 2008 06:22 to the question "contacts edited in Soocial are being un-edited" in Soocial:

Here's what I did

Disabled Gmail sync, but didn't delete it.
Tweaked all my contacts in addressbook until they were exactly how I wanted them.
Made a backup of my addressbook
Went through the addressbook and deleted all of the middle names
Reenabled Gmail sync.
Let Soocial do it's thing.

Now, all my contacts are alphabatized correctly, but they are missing the middle name/initial. In the future, when the Soocial/Gmail thing is worked out, I plan on importing the backup addressbook file, and letting soocial merge everything to add the middle names back in to my contacts. Not sure if it will work, but I think it should.

Chris

cbolstad replied on November 21, 2008 21:00 to the question "contacts edited in Soocial are being un-edited" in Soocial:

Obviously I don't work for soocial, but I believe your specific problem (John Quincy Adams) is a result of the way gmail stores it's contacts. Gmail (unlike most other contact managment programs) doesn't have separate fields for first and last name. So, when soocial sends your names "John Quincy" and "Adams", they get stored in gmail as "John Quincy Adams" all in one field. Then the next time soocial checks it, it has to try to figure out which part of the name is the first name and which part is the last, the result is " John" "Quincy Adams". The same thing happens if you put multiple people in the contact "John and Jane Doe" becomes "John" "and Jane Doe". I remember seeing somewhere that Soocial is working on this and are hoping to improve it in the future, but I don't know when.

Chris

cbolstad replied on November 21, 2008 07:39 to the problem "Scrambled Addresses" in Soocial:

It's happening to me as well. I've been doing some experimenting and it must have something to do with the way Soocial is parsing the address data from gmail (because gmail doesn't use separate fields for each line of the address).

If you enter the address data in soocial or addressbook, it pushes to gmail correctly, and gets displayed as

Street

City
State
Zip

all in one field. If you enter the address data in Gmail in the same format, it will likewise get synced to soocial and addressbook correctly. But, if you enter the address in Gmail the way you would write it

Street
City, State Zip

when it gets synced to soocial and gmail it gets displayed as

City,StateZipStreet

with all of the data crammed into the street field and the city state zip fields are left blank.

Chris

cbolstad started following the question "Syncing with Blackberry Storm from Verizon?" in Soocial.

cbolstad replied on November 12, 2008 16:57 to the question "Initial sync missing "some" addresses" in Soocial:

Me too. The notes fields are filled on my mac, and the notes are pushed to Gmail, but they don't show up in Soocial.

Chris

cbolstad replied on November 02, 2008 05:53 to the problem "Loads of duplicate contacts" in Soocial:

I will pile on with a "me too". I've had this issue for a few weeks, and have just been letting Soocial do it's thing (which is kind of funny to watch). I have about 80 copies of the same person in Gmail with absolutely no info except his name and company name (all the other info WAS there when this all started). Anyways, I was talking to Bart about it here http://getsatisfaction.com/soocial/to... and he said he would have somebody else take a look at it, but I haven't heard back. I finally removed the Address Book connection so I can straighten those contacts out and at least have one contact list that I can use. I've left the Gmail connection active in case it will help with the debugging.

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 28, 2008 05:00 to the problem "Addressbook to Soocial to Gmail created all sorts of problems" in Soocial:

Any updates here?
Soocial is showing 763 contacts (including 66 duplicate copies of one person). Gmail has 349 and AddressBook 372.
I really only have about 125 (give or take a couple).

Like I said, I have all of this backed up so it will be no problem for me to restore once the bugs are worked out. So, I don't mind having it all messed up for a while if it will help with the debugging. Just let me know when you are done so I can fix things.

Also, I don't know if it is related or not, but AddressBook has now stopped syncing automatically. I am not sure how long ago this started (several days at least), but it now only syncs when I click on Sync Now.

Let me know whats up.
Chris

cbolstad replied on October 22, 2008 05:37 to the problem "Addressbook to Soocial to Gmail created all sorts of problems" in Soocial:

So Soocial has been acting squirrelly all day.
My mac now has 3 copies of 123 contacts for 369 total
Soocial has 535 (4 copies of most plus some others)
Gmail has been bouncing around all day. It currently has 155 (including the 15 filtered contacts) but I think it was 200+ earlier today, I know it was at least to 180. I have a few contacts with about 7 copies in Gmail (obviously names and numbers only).

Like I said, I am not worried about anything getting screwed up as I have backups of it all so I figure I will just let Soocial play its crazy games until things get worked out.

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 21, 2008 05:20 to the problem "Addressbook to Soocial to Gmail created all sorts of problems" in Soocial:

Hmmmm, crazy Soocial.

Gmail now has 122 contacts including some dupes and the filtered contacts so there are about 20 that aren't showing up yet. It looks like Soocial is adding about 20 contacts to Gmail every time it syncs (about every eight hours?).

Soocial now has 854. Looks like 7 copies of 122 contacts

My mac still has 126 (the correct number)

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 20, 2008 17:00 to the problem "Addressbook to Soocial to Gmail created all sorts of problems" in Soocial:

Soocial must be doing something, I am now up to 97 contacts in Gmail (including the 15 that get filtered). So now Gmail is only missing about 40.

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 20, 2008 16:39 to the problem "Addressbook to Soocial to Gmail created all sorts of problems" in Soocial:

Soocial added about 6 more contacts to Gmail (now 77 total including the 15 that Soocial ignores) So there are about 60 contacts missing from Gmail that I think should be there.

I am assuming you ran the deduper since I awoke to 122 contacts in Soocial (down from 243).

I had turned off syncing to my mac in the prefpane while I was experimenting before, and forgot to turn it back on. After turning it on I did a sync now, and Soocial went up to 244. I waited a little while, and then ran sync now again hoping to fix some of the dupes, and instead soocial just added all the contacts again so I currently have:

Gmail-77 (includes 15 not synced through soocial, so it is missing about 60)
Soocial-366 (3 copies of everything)
Mac-126 (pretty close to the number I should have)

I am missing quite a few contacts that were there before this all started. I don't know why they were deleted. If it helps I can give you the specific names etc.

Let me know what to do

Chris

cbolstad reported a problem in Soocial on October 20, 2008 03:58:

Addressbook to Soocial to Gmail created all sorts of problems

Ive waited for everything to update several times to see if Soocial could fix it's own problems but it hasn't.

I imported a stack of vcards to my mac addressbook.
Soocial deleted all contacts from my addressbook.
Soocial then re-added the 126 contacts I had imported back into addressbook (but the contacts that were originally there were deleted and not replaced).
Soocial then deleted all contacts (except the filtered contacts) from Gmail and left it that way for a day (this freaked me out a little).
The next day Soocial added 56 contacts to Gmail.
Soocial duplicated every contact in it's own database.
So as it stands now, Gmail has 56 contacts (not including the 15 being filtered by soocial), Soocial has 243, and Addressbook has 126. I am missing a large chunk of contacts that were syncing correctly across all three apps, but are now gone.

What happened to the missing contacts?
Why are only part of my contacts being synced to Gmail?
Why do I have 2 of everything in Soocial?
Why is abbreviated such a long word? (sorry, I got carried away)

I have all of my contacts backed up outside of soocial, so if I have to delete everything and start from scratch I can, but I thought I would see if we can figure out a few of these bugs first.

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 16, 2008 20:35 to the problem "Gmail not syncing, problem with addressbook?" in Soocial:

Looks good. There were about 10 duplicates, but I just deleted them and all is well. Thanks.
Chris

cbolstad replied on October 13, 2008 16:04 to the problem "Gmail not syncing, problem with addressbook?" in Soocial:

On Oct 7th (5 days after I deleted and re-added the connection), I received the email backup of my Gmail contacts from Soocial. Since then, nothing has happened. I have added a contact directly in Soocial, which now appears on my Mac and in Highrise, but not in Gmail. I have also added several contacts in Gmail that do not appear in Soocial. Soocial currently shows 218 contacts, taking into account the contacts from Gmail which would get stuck in the filter, Soocial SHOULD be showing about 224.

On the Soocial connections page, the Gmail connection shows "Scheduled for Manual Sync". It has been that way since Oct 2nd (ten days).

What should I do?

cbolstad replied on October 08, 2008 19:25 to the question "Hey Bart, are you there?" in Soocial:

Bart, I left my comments in the other thread.

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 08, 2008 07:36 to the problem "Gmail not syncing, problem with addressbook?" in Soocial:

I received the email from Soocial with my gmail backup in it today(4days after I deleted / added the connection), but soocial has still not synced with Gmail. The Gmail connection is still marked "Scheduled for Manual sync".

Chris

cbolstad replied on October 03, 2008 23:25 to the problem "Gmail not syncing, problem with addressbook?" in Soocial:

Hey,no problem.I deleted and re-added the Gmail connection. It didn't perform an initial sync so I tried a manual sync. It hasn't done anything yet (been about 8 hours) and it is still marked "Scheduled for manual sync". What should I do?

Chris