And now for something completely different.

I’ve spent a few hours these last few days going through my digital address books and trying to sync them up. We’ll see if the system maintains itself. That’s the key — that I don’t really want to have to think about it much going forward other than the occasional adding/changing of an address. More details below the fold for those of you who want to skip to the baby pictures (I don’t blame you).

Here’s the (rough) instructions for how I took control of my contacts (at least for now). I am running Mac OS X 10.6.3 and Address Book 5.0.1.

1. Backup both your google contacts list AND your address book addresses. Both programs have simple export tools. Figure them out yourself.

2. In Address Book, went to Preferences > Accounts > Account Information. Selected the “synchronize with Google” box and entered my gmail account and password.

3. This automatically put the iSync icon on the menu bar at the very top of my screen. You can remove it by option-clicking and dragging it off the menu bar. But I wouldn’t do that just yet, as I did.

4. Open both your address book AND your google contacts page, side by side if possible. Run a sync by clicking on the iSync icon and saying “Sync now”.

5. Observe any changes and you might have to adjudicate some conflicts between similar contacts. This process didn’t really make sense to me, but it didn’t seem to disrupt too many of my existing contacts, although it did create a lot of duplicates. I tried to use the “merge contacts” function on Google, but it didn’t help.

6. Wait a few minutes, reload both apps, to make sure all the changes have gone through. I noticed that the total number of cards in my address book did not quite equal the total number of contacts in Google. It appears that some of my Address Book contacts are in the “My Contacts” list on Google and some are in the “All Contacts” list. For example, I have 389 contacts in Address Book, but only 317 of them are in My Contacts. The rest are in All Contacts. Google says that it only syncs contacts in My Contacts, but maybe that means that they only push changes that are made in My Contacts to the Address Book contacts.

7. In any case, this was when I started playing around. I made a few changes in one application and then synced and checked the changes. I found it much easier to navigate Address Book and make changes there. So I went through a huge number of cards, deleting old contacts or contacts whose info I don’t trust to be current anymore. This took a few hours. But I winnowed down the list from 900+ to just under 400.

8. I saved it, thinking of this as my master contact list that I would use to backup if anything happens.

9. Then I ran a final sync. This seems to have worked. No more dupes, mostly people who are legitimate contacts, etc…

10. Now there’s the issue of maintaining the list, and I wonder how ongoing communication through gmail will add to my contacts over time. Will the address book get muddled again? Will new duplicate contacts appear?

Overall, I was surprised that the programs don’t seem to use email addresses as some kind of primary identifier of records. It seems much more unique than anything else you could use, as the software seems to have made some choices based on names at different points.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 11:03 am and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.