robthecomputerguy's dashboard

I thought maybe he did answer it wrong - but ebay girl wasn't propagating... But low and behold, ebay girl did.

By the way, ebay girl isn't ebay girl, she is Kim Pelham... but her email address has her name attached to her.

The temporary fix for me is to disable cell phone syncing for Soocial. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Nokia phones, and I set my phone to NOT sync contacts with only email addresses into my phone's address book. That way ebay girl won't end up in my phone. If ebay girl ends up in the OSX address book for the time being I can deal with it, but I cannot deal with her in my phone.

I understand the difference with the suggested contacts and will go complain to google, but I would beg you to make the highest priority to sync a specific group in Gmail so we can control this. These auto-added contacts are like a virus in the system.

And not that I don't think you have done a decent job with this, you have done the best you can, but we need to take it one step higher.

Even if it means that I have other problems because I only sync gmail with a specific list, I will take those problems over the ebay girl virus.

rob

Simon, according to Stefan's answer above, your post is wrong about the filter (see #3 in his post) and you should delete what you just wrote.

Stefan, before your reply above, I don't think we understood #3 to be the case at all. That was the only concern I think any of us had. (I understand the situation was different before the existence of "suggested contacts".)

And since I can't put a feeling on a comment I'll do it manually: I feel super duper happy and I get a fabulous little tingly feeling when I use Soocial! :0 – robthecomputerguy, on August 30, 2008 17:55

But now I'm really confused because the ebay girl was added to my suggested contacts yesterday and she is nowhere else to be found in my soocial network.

OK... I think that rob from new york will take the initiative and be blunt here. I'm really from new york, so...

Gmail automatically adds contacts with names from the email. I have a contact that Soocial just sync'ed who bought a phone from me on ebay. She is under no circumstances, at all, to be synced anywhere else. She is sync'ed because gmail added her automatically and of course it picked up her first and last name from her email address fields.

Everyone types in their name in their email account setup/settings, thus gmail picks up everyone's first and last name with their email address when executing the auto-add. Thus, I think the logic "we only sync email addresses with a last or company name" is completely faulty because you're syncing 99.9% of email addresses.

Since Gmail now puts these contacts in suggested, Soocial has a method at its disposal to ignore the ebay girl. It is my opinion and it seems to be the opinion of some of the people in this thread that suggested contacts should be ignored. Again my opinion, but this needs to be done yesterday.

Since gmail will move suggested contacts into "my contacts" if I email them frequently, I have an automatic system in place for migrating those new contacts into the Soocial system. Of course, if the only place that contact exists is in my gmail account, I can move them to my contacts manually. The likelihood of a contact ONLY existing in my gmail suggested contacts? Really, that is highly unlikely. Try to come up with an example of someone I am emailing frequently who I want to have access to their email address everywhere else, but I only have their email address... with what method would I be emailing them that I had to look up their email address on my cell phone?

I'm not adverse to syncing a contact with only an email address, but take a step back and objectively assess the average importance of a contact record where the ONLY information you have about the contact is their email address... that's much lower than average. If the ONLY reason they exist as a contact is because you replied to an email they sent you, there is probably a 1 in 500 chance that they should propagate to any other database in your life.

I hope this makes it clear, because I think this is a serious lapse in how the system works.

Thanks for the reply. I like to think of myself as a computer geek, but truthfully I'm really not one of those people that comprehends the full fanbulousness of Facebook anyway. I mean I use it, and I put in status updates anyway, but other than that, I'm not sure why people would email me there who have my real email address, you know? And then of course do I care about having the class of 1987 in my gmail contacts? Uh, probably not. But I'm down for trying everything, so I tried it. I'll try just about anything. :) Thanks again for the reply!

I actually don't think I can use soocial if it is going to clutter up my other address books with gmail suggested addresses....?