Connected Well

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.

Rahhb Apps, Tools, mobile cloud, cloud computing, contact management, contacts, gmail, google, googlevoice, googlewave

Google’s really laying on the additions to GoogleVoice. It seems they’re really moving forward with things at a rapid pace. The latest addition is a gMail Labs add-on that will have GoogleVoice voicemails show up in your mailbox, and you can play them on the spot:

Previously, clicking “Play message” opened a new page in your browser, but starting today, you can play voicemails right in Gmail. Just turn on the Google Voice player from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings and whenever you get a voicemail notification, the player will appear right below the message itself.

Best of all, your message status will stay synced: messages played from Gmail will appear as read in your Google Voice inbox and won’t be played again when you check new messages via your phone. If you already use Google Voice, try it out and let us know what you think. If you don’t have a Google Voice account yet, sign up for an invitation and we’ll get you one ASAP.

Read the article at the gMail Blog

api Apps, Tools communication, google, googlevoice, telephone, voice, voip