Google’s contact management interface in Gmail has been pain. ful. ly. s.l.o.w. in the past , but it worked, and it was smart enough to know who you communicate with the most and update your chat list accordingly.  In fact, as long as you didn’t ever access contacts directly, all was well in Google-Happy-Cloud-Computing-Land.

Now, thanks to other apps that need contacts like Voice* and Wave, access to these across the GoogleVerse** has spawned the need to just pull the contact manager out into its own app, namely, Google Contacts.  And, like Mashable points out, Google Contacts is adding a much-needed “de-dupify” feature that tries to merge your contacts down to size when import/export, syncing and auto-contact management madness ends up bloating your contact file.

If only New Year’s Resolutions were so easy.

In trying the feature, I admit merging my 1600+ contact list didn’t work after repeated tries and script timeouts in firefox. I am sure it will improve.

* I don’t know why, but accessing contacts in the Google Voice interface always seems to work quicker than from gMail.
**Um, this is an off-the-cuff contraction of “Google” and “Universe”, not Google’s latest poetry or scripture-reading app.

Google tasks is doing some great stuff.  It’s simple, intuitive and awesome.

Click to enlarge

When you’ve got your mind flowing and you’re cranking out tasks left and right, it’s nice to have your list right there so you can blow away completed items with the box-checking-pleasure you know you secretly love almost as much as that song you keep humming to yourself.  This is an excellent way to keep a log of what you’re doing, which can be extra valuable if you are a consultant or contractor and need to invoice your clients for work performed.

Google Tasks is easy to work right along side you without getting in your way.  It’s low-maintenance, doesn’t complain about the bad coffee in your office, and instantaneously synchronizes across all the methods you use to access it (see below). This is one of my favorite things Gmail Labs has done.

First, enable it in Gmail by clicking the “Tasks” link under “Contacts” on the left side of your Gmail window.

Enable Google Tasks in Gmail

It creates a chat-style pop-up box that fits in your lower-right corner or can be popped out to its own window for your task-defeating pleasure while you reply like the inbox-zero mad-dog you are. FTW!!!

Second, enable it in Google Calendar by looking for the “Tasks” link (Google web designers are so smart to label it that!) and two things happen:

1) Your task lists will show up on the right side of your calendar for easy maintenance and
2) Your scheduled tasks will show up on your calendar itself, allowing for easy viewing and completion right on the calendar.

Gmail blog explains more about Tasks in Calendar.

Third, find alternate ways to access your tasks:

Bookmark it on your smartphone ( go to gmail.com/tasks from your blackberry, palm, HTC, android or other web-aware phone.  Oh, and of course, snobby iPhone-ers get special treatment)

You can also add it to iGoogle as a gadget or the standalone “Tasks Canvas” page to view, edit and manage tasks in other places. I have a “chores” list that I pull up on our Opera browser for the Wii so the kids can see and check off their chores on Saturday morning.   Geeky? Yes, but it gets the carpets vacuumed.

BONUS RESOURCES

Here are some bonus links for your clickety browsing pleasure:

• Task Jedi? Check out Google’s help page for keyboard shortcuts and tips to become a real taskmaster (the good kind… not the kind prefaced with “evil”… or the Marvel Comic character). Sort. Categorize. Complete. Repeat.
• Do you like to GTD? See how to approach Nirvana with gTasks here.
• Got Chrome? Follow these tips to make a Google Tasks shortcut on your desktop. It pops up in its own window and has a shortcut icon on your computer desktop or quick-launch menu (depending on your OS). This works and it’s slick!

I have a gmail account that is the nerve-center of my digital communication empire, but I also have two GoogleApps domains (one for M|REC and the other for mMEdia) and a client of mine has their email hosted on GoogleApps, too.

When I am juggling between accounts, I have a few options:

1. Send mail from one (or multiple) accounts.
   I have taken great pains to arrange each of these accounts so that I can send email from my @gmail account via each of the other ones (except my client’s, for obvious reasons).  While this adds some convenience, it is tedious to setup, and then I have certain copies of some messages in one place, with others in other places.  More about that in another post–or not. This also used to tack on the unprofessional “on behalf of” header until they revealed how to avoid it just recently by configuring gmail to send the mail through your other domain’s SMTP server.

   Fair warning: Try doing this if you want, but that sound you just heard was at least one other reader’s head exploding.  Do not try this at home, or in the presence of small children or endangered species.

2. Configure Firefox to ask you when you click a “mailto:” link how you want to send the mail.This is a totally awesome example of why FireFox makes IE wimper and cry for its mommy(ies?).  Follow the link over to LifeHacker to see the code you need to drop into your address bar to configure not only Gmail to launch from a mailto: link, but any Google Apps domain.

   For me, I ran through this step-by-step configuration once for each of my accounts: Gmail, MREC, mMEdia and my client.  Now I have a long list of options that pop up gleefully when I click a “mailto:” link and I no-longer have to wait the 196 seconds for Outlook to sieze my computer on loading only for me to shut it off.

   The trick is to not commit any of the options as the default, then everytime you click a “mailto:” link, you will get the option screen to choose.  Note that you can also launch Outlook or Thunderbird or another desktop app, too, allowing you to flow between even more personalities.

   Somewhere, my therapist is smiling.

Lifehacker: Configure mailto: links to launch in Gmail or other GoogleApps for Domains accounts

Web savvy Internet users know to Not Share Your Email Address unless you want to be spammed to death.  I completely agree. But gMail from Google can help you share your address with a reasonable certainty that, if the spamming begins, you can easilly shut it off.

• First (and most powerful) is the feature, commonly called “plus addressing“, and which is appropriate per the Email RFC #822 (see pages 8&9), allows you to add additional information to your gMail address between your username and the “@gmail.com” portion of the address to give you a little more information about where you divulged this address, and to whom.

• Next, gMail addresses are “dot blind“, meaning you can add as many dots (periods) in the username portion of your email address as you want (as long as the username does not start or end with a period)

For example:

If your email address is mykittenrocks@gmail.com, any of the following combinations will send email to your account, and you can tell gMail to filter them if you want, or label them a certain way, etc:

• mykittenrocks+thecasbah@gmail.com (link to the song by the Clash, on YouTube)
• my.kitten.rocks@gmail.com
• m.y.k.i.t.t…e.n.ROCKS@gmail.com
• my.kitten.rocks+dont.spam.me@gmail.com
• mykittenrocks+subscriptions+sitename@gmail.com

Anders Jacobsen recommends subscribing to a website with the name of the website and the month, date and year you subscribed:

I usually register at websites with an email address of the form username+sitename+yyyy-mm-dd@domain.com and if I ever receive unsolicited email to this address (see my previous rants on dialpad.com) it’s easy not only to track where the spammer got my address from, but also to block this address for future emails.

The final way gMail helps you share your email address without undue future pain is to give you great Spam Filtering and Unsubscription tools:

Clicking “Report Spam” on junk emails helps gMail keep that same message from hitting other unsuspecting (and surely less savvy) users than you.

See a YouTube video about how gMail fights spam.

Mashable notes a new feature that makes it easy to unsubscribe from spammy email lists.

People like Jeremy Zowodny use this feature for gMail to scrub his email before he downloads it to his personal email server

Last week, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said that Twitter is a “poor man’s email system” (live notes) .

… which pretty much means he’s clueless on what Twitter’s for.

And, by the way, how poor do you have to get to use a poor man’s email system… you know, since email is, well, um… free.

(Hat Tips here and here)

Note to application developers… if you want to know if people like your application or not, well, here’s a clue. If they take the time to explain it like these guys talk about GMAIL, then, well, I think you can safely say they’re passionate users.

Russian Gmail Art