I have Telegram and Peach and Facebook Messenger and Do Note and Slack and dozens of other text/speech communications apps on my phone. It seems inescapable that natural dialogue is the next big thing in digital interface. Then why do my contacts still look terrible?
My contacts are currently the product of a tiny amount of people I knew in high school, some friends from college, groups of people I needed to know when I worked in retail, miscellaneous contact info for some freelance work I did a year ago, and maybe one hundred people I actually need to know.
I use Apple and Google contacts, and have them synced natively in the Contacts apps for Mac and iOS. I have tried using Evernote, Vipor, Atmospheir, IFTTT, and Mail Butler to solve the nightmare organization of my contacts. The “smart” organization seems to do more harm than good. I’ve written the rant bit of this in a list below.
- How do I find a group of people that are part of a particular project I’m working on? Why can’t contacts be in more than one group?
- What if someone has more than one job title, or is a freelancer?
- Where can I link Instagram accounts to a contact?
- Why don’t my favorites lists sync from my phone to my Mac?
- How do I automatically sync Google and Apple contacts?
- How do I quickly see what the people in my contacts have been saying on social media recently?
- What if I want to get push notifications for online activity by a certain contact?
- How can I easily edit a group of contacts?
I understand that creating a new organization format for an endlessly variable social construct is a difficult process. But I totally believe in you tech industry. You just need to make something less terrible than a Rolodex.
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