So I’m sick and tired of contact management applications. I have not come across anything that does the job well enough. I am frustrated with a specific aspect of contact apps at the moment. I have a very common situation which is that I have many friends that are couples or married so I put both their names in one contact form. Problem is they both have mobile numbers and there’s no way to differentiate who’s mobile number is who’s. I know this sounds petty but how am I supposed to remember this with over 800 contacts? Who ever created the contact list standards many years ago didn’t think this all the way thorough.
Am I doing something wrong? What do you do? Do you only put 1 person per contact card? What about their home number? It can only be in there once, otherwise it won’t show the proper caller ID.
I’m really perplexed on how to handle this. One couple in particular, close friends of our family, I have both their mobile #rs and can never remember whose is whose. I actually specifically don’t put some peoples spouses mobile numbers in my address book because I might get their #rs confused. Sad thing is, this was so much easier when I was using dumb phones (S40) back in the day, with only 1 number per name. So you might have Jeb Cell, Jeb Work, Jeb Home, etc.
Is their a solution to this, I can’t think of one that I like? I need whatever it is to be fully compatible with my MacBook Address Book app, Entourage, Outlook, Google Contacts (which still isn’t up to snuff), Nokia S60 phones (in my case), and all the other places I sync/back up my device. This means that standards that are many years old must change. Is this going to happen? I sure hope so, but don’t hold your breath.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Ricky Cadden // May 4, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Simple – each person gets their own card, and none of my friends are lame enough to have a home number anymore.
If they are, make a personal policy to put the home number on either the dude or the chick, and follow that through in your entire phonebook.
2 Kevin Neely // May 4, 2009 at 2:50 pm
I think there should always be one contact card per person. Don’t force them to lose their identity.
For example, I have entries for each of my parents. Their mobile numbers are different, but the “home” phone is the same on both. A little bit of repeated entry but not a big deal.
The ability to link contact cards somehow would be nice. Maybe contacts 2.0 should be a mini social network, with connections between the different entries showing degrees of separation. It could just pull this data from the large public social networks. That would be neat.
In other news, Avatar photos with significant other = FAIL. Keep your identity, people!
3 Jeb Brilliant // May 4, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Kevin,
If you have your parents home number on both of their contact cards don’t you have an issue with the caller ID when they call you? The phone won’t know which name to show so it just shows the #?
4 Ricky Cadden // May 5, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Jeb – true, but which name would you expect the phone to show, if you have the same number for 2 people? How is the phone supposed to know which person is doing the heavy breathing on the other end of the phone line?
What if the phone guessed your mom, when really, it was your dad? Maybe not too embarassing, but what about a business contact, where three people have the same main line? That could potentially be frustrating. If you give everyone their own identity, as Kevin puts it, there’s no issues.
Leave a Comment