intlect.com

Let me start with the obvious: for a company that does email so well, doing contacts so bad is unfuckingbelievable, especially considering all those Android devices out there which supposedly use their Contacts app quite a bit.

1. There is no field for Middle Name, Prefix, Suffix, Nickname (kind of lying about this field; more details below), Company Department, or Maiden Name.

2. There is no option for ordering contacts by their last names. They can officially only be ordered by their first names, just like idiots organize their address books.

3. There is a Nickname field on the website but it doesn’t sync with Mac OS’s built-in Google Contacts sync. If that would be it there would be no issue. Eff it, I have the nicknames on my machine, I don’t need to look them up on Google Contacts. Oops, where did the effing nicknames go??? Oh, now I see, if I set up syncing with Google Contacts come time when the second sync is initiated, Google sends me down contacts without the nicknames that present themselves as newer to the ones on the Mac because well, they just had their nicknames removed in the sync, so I must really want my local contacts to be missing the nicknames as well.

4. No issues, I’ll just stop the syncing. Syncing is a difficult thing, anyways. Not something a company with a USD 168 billion market cap could ever do.

5. So I just gave up on syncing and decide I’ll be exporting my Address Book and importing it into Google Contacts. Cool. That ought to work. Wow, WTF is this? I get contacts sorted by their last name now! Wowwy wow wow wow! So, if I select all my contacts in Address Book on the Mac and File –> Export –> Export vCard and then import it into Google Contacts, I can have them sorted by their last name! Finally! YES!

6. Oh, this sorting by last name really sucks if you also use Google Chat. Your tab bar keeps saying “Mayerson says…” instead of “John”. Seeing as Chat is really effing this up I’m left to believe that Google Contacts, even when importing a vCard with clearly detailed fields, doesn’t give a crap about such insignificant details and just mashes them all together now, and Google Chat takes the “first” name in a Name field as being the First Name.

7. So who cares if it isn’t John that’s saying something to me, or if my eyeballs pop up like crazy when I see my girlfriend’s last name there and I think it’s her dad sending me a message. Sheesh!

At least I have my contacts. And Google is really nice and will help me by automatically adding those new people I email to my contact list. And I can then just look at them and… Oh, wait, I can’t look at them. Let’s see:
My Contacts says I have 881 contacts. Same number as on my Mac. So cool.
All Contacts says I have 883 contacts. Seems about right. I emailed a couple of people I didn’t have in my Address Book prior to my upload so it seems right.
I click on View Suggestions. Cause, like… those 883-881=2 contacts should be something along the lines of suggestions, right? Suggestions = 0. WTF? Am I supposed to go through them manually and see which those 2 contacts are? Apparently, I do…
I contacted Google Apps Premier support about this (I pay Google $100 bucks a year for the 2 Premier accounts I have on my main domain). Let me quote them here because although I’m getting my money’s worth in the email department, the support is lousy at best (not to mention EXTREMELY slow… I once even forgot I’d contacted them by the time I got a reply:

The issue you’ve described is expected behavior and you won’t be able to see the ‘Suggested contacts’ apart from the manner in which you’re accessing it right now. We don’t really have a solution for this specific scenario.

Thank you, Big G. Thank you for helping “organize the world’s information“.