New contact syncs from Outlook to Soocial but not to Gmail

I've found some more hints on what is going on here: My Gmail address is not a foo@gmail.com type address, but an address on my own domain using "Google Apps for my Domain" or whatever it is called. This email address works with Gmail, including Gmail contacts, and Google docs. It does not allow me to log into Google Reader though, which is not part of Google Apps.

So I created a Google Account with the same email address. It uses a different password, but otherwise lets me log into Google Reader with the same email address.

I now tried to connect to http://contacts.google.com using my Google Account password instead of my Gmail password, and I see that I have a different contacts list there. That one is indeed in sync with the list in Soocial.

Which is nice, but useless to me, as the push-syncing between iPhone and Gmail uses the Gmail account and not a Google account.

The somewhat confusing part for me is that I did delete all my Gmail contacts before connecting it to Soocial to get a fresh copy of my contacts from Outlook, and that seems to have happened. Which somewhat contradicts the scenario outlined above. But maybe I did not have syncing between the iPhone and the OS X address book disabled at that time, so the contacts may have moved from Outlook to Google Account contacts to OS X Addressbook all via Soocial, then to the iPhone via iTunes, and then to the Gmail contacts via the Exchange protocol.

But that is obviously a suboptimal solution because it requires an iPhone sync via USB cable. I hope you can figure out how to sync from Soocial directly to a "hosted" Gmail account and not just to a "native" one.

I did manage to get everything working now. I disabled the OAuth tokens from both the Gmail and the Google Account accounts (and removed the Gmail conncection in Soocial). When I tried to re-create the Gmail connection I noticed that the choices from the Google authorization page seems to depend on which accounts I have logged into before: sometimes it would not give me a choice, sometimes I could choose between my email address and "other", but "other" would then only accept Google Account names and not my Gmail account. :(

I then deleted all cookies in the browser, logged into my Gmail account, switched to Soocial and added a Gmail connection. This time it ended up connecting to my Gmail account and updated the contacts.

Since it seems to be working right now I don't really want to experiment with this any more. Especially since I don't know if my results are reproducible, or if I just got lucky this time.

So it looks this is all a problem with the Google authorization page, and the choices it offers in which accounts I can choose. But maybe there is something in the OAuth protocol that you can use to ask them to display a wider variety of choices; I have really no clue. The fact that the current mode of operation seems to depend on the state of various cookies from Google is rather confusing though.

Oh, and just in case you guys want to play with a Google Apps Gmail account yourself: There doesn't seem to be any link to the "My Account" page that you get for a normal Google Account (and which links to the "authorized websites" page), but you can construct the URL to it yourself: https://www.google.com/a/mydomain.com... where "mydomain.com" of course needs to be replaced with your domain name).