

Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+ - joshma
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/gmail-and-contacts-get-better-with.html

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MHBerryman
Wow, what is up with those share buttons at the end of each post? Just in case
nobody else is seeing this, they start off cramped together and when moused
over they break apart in a very fluid animation.

Yes it looks nice, but it moves the button from under the cursor! And then
just as bad, the cursor doesn't change to a hand to show it's an interact-able
object.

Is this just me? Am I alone in seeing this or thinking that this is bad UX?

~~~
esrauch
The expand thing is strange but it looks like it's a latency improvement so
that they don't have to fetch the counts for all the posts on page load.

The cursor is a hand for me though on Chrome though.

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rodh257
Not sure if it's part of these changes but I'm glad that everyone you've ever
emailed no longer gets added to your contacts list. That was a pain whenever I
synced with my Android phone, all of a sudden my phonebook was full of useless
email addresses that I'd emailed once off. So glad that's fixed!

~~~
abraham
Google added an option to disable this.

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jarcoal
Anyone have a good idea of how many people are using Google Contacts?

I've looked at the API before and considered some mashup ideas, but never
pursued because I don't know anyone relying on it.

~~~
aymeric
Many people use Google Apps / Gmail and synchronize it with their iPhones
(email, calendar, contacts, ...)

~~~
kbd
I do this. I sync'd my iPhone's contacts with my Google Apps account and
actually got rid of all the contacts on my iPhone itself. Now all the contacts
on my phone are my Google Apps contacts accessed through Google's Exchange.

I finally have a unified contact list! Well, maybe not quite unified: my
instant messaging contacts -- on non Jabber-based services (AIM, MSN, Yahoo)
-- are still separate.

~~~
ark15
I do this as well. (Just switched from android (N1) to iPhone (4S) just to try
out the iPhone experience)

My only gripe is that iPhone does not sync all phone numbers. example - Google
allows custom phone number types (other than work/mobile/home) that I use a
lot and none of these custom phone numbers show up on iPhone. (I wonder if
there is a solution to this. Haven't searched for one yet) It was all nicely
integrated on android.

------
zmmmmm
So I click "Edit Profile" but don't see any phone number fields.

Even if I did I'd be scared it's going to get published to the universe since
Google seems to repeatedly emphasise that my profile is public and there is
nothing I can do about it.

Does anyone know how to use this? Is it still rolling out?

Edit: never mind, phone number is hidden under Places Lived / Home, which
seems extremely weird to me.

~~~
rwolf
You can also specify which circles see the entire blob of contact info. I
would prefer to send each bit to a different circle, but it's 1 step up from
the permapublic name field.

------
therobotking
Every time an announcement like this is made I get a bunch of angry messages
from friends I've convinced to use Google Apps for their personal email who
will have to wait an unspecified amount of time for the new features.

~~~
Lewisham
Well, it's your fault, so I hardly blame them. Why on earth would you tell
people to use Google Apps as a personal email service? It's a mallet to a
crack a nut. Google Apps is for businesses, it's probably even a little much
for SOHO. If people want their own email address, just buy the domain, forward
the email to Gmail and use the Send As feature to send from that address.

I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the cat-calls that surrounds Every
Single Google Launch when it isn't on Apps straight away. Except if you'd been
given weird information from someone who should know better, I suppose.

I would say Google probably should shoulder some of the responsibility for not
dissuading the individual users it doesn't want to support with GApps from
signing up.

~~~
pyre
One needs an actual MX to forward to a gmail address, no? You can't just point
your MX record at Google's servers. That's an additional cost that doesn't
exist for Google Apps for Domains.

PS: If Google wanted to gear it towards businesses, they should have named it
Google Apps for Businesses. In general though, I'm sure that the free vs. paid
accounts is probably a pretty good divider between business and personal use.

------
jrockway
Nice. CRM for your mom.

------
danmaz74
As seen on HN... :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290007>

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buro9
Did they buy Rapportive?

~~~
rahulvohra
Nope, we're still here :)

~~~
buro9
Good good, I've great fondness for your little sidebar.

------
gangadhargs
Now all of my Google+ contacts show up in the gmail chat (that appears next to
gmail window). How often do we chat with our contacts in google+? I don't like
this since it crowds out my legitimate contacts from gmail chat.

~~~
joebadmo
As tonfa points out here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331505>

You can actually select which Circles show up in your gchat list. Which is
really useful!

------
v21
The headline says "Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+", but actually
most of these features are about making your Google+ experience better, not
your gmail experience better. In other words, this smells more of corporate
policy than product improvement.

~~~
joebadmo
Not sure how you're coming to that conclusion. It gives you G+ data when you
look at a contact in Gmail. It automatically updates your contacts' info. It
seems like a really good set of pretty obvious integrations that makes all of
the products better, to me.

~~~
jsnell
More data is not necessarily better. This just destroyed the usability of
chat. And I care about chat a lot more than G+, so if one of the two needs to
go, it's going to be G+.

For this to not be a major regression, at least you would need to be able to
limit the import to only to some circles. It would even fit in better with the
Google+ ideals of treating different groups of "friends" differently.

~~~
tonfa
You can select which circles appear in chat (but only from the G+ chatbox as
far as I know).

~~~
jsnell
Ah, under "privacy". Not exactly the most intuitive process, but at least it's
possible. Thanks!

------
flyt
Every one of these features would be great if it were the Facebook equivalent,
instead of G+. It's unfortunate that Google's insistence on never
acknowledging Facebook's existence limits their long term relevance and
success.

~~~
fpgeek
Slamming Google for not adding Facebook integration, when it was Facebook who
blocked Google's access to Facebook contact information in the first place is
... odd, at the very least.

