"Suggested contacts" missing

[mafa]

Hi!

I got 286 "real" contacts in adress book. Usually I delete most of my
suggested contacts every week or so.
Only that when I click on my contact manager now, the link to my
"Suggested contacts" is missing?!?

I see:

My contacts (286)
----
(various groups I set up)
----
All contacts (around 400)
Most contacted (20)



When I access "All contacts" I can see ALL contacts (as the name
says...), not just the suggested ones.


Please help!

[Sean Murphy]

    Interesting. I just checked and I see the same amendment. I read about a new feature that was just rolled out, allowing us to merge duplicate contacts - this change must be related to that. Since I gave up on going through and deleting unhelpful Suggested Contacts a while ago, it won't affect me, but perhaps if you change to a reduced function like "Old Version" or "HTML" it might bring Suggested Contacts back for you, maybe? Probably not, but I can't think of any other way. Perhaps you could change your routine from deleting Suggested Contacts to merging Duplicate Contacts? It would basically be the same thing.

-Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...

[Zack (Doc)]

It seems they "fixed" the search at the same time. I went in to
research your post Sean and found it harder to find the duplicates
I've previously had to do a merge with. While doing so, I discovered
that when I type in the contact search box I'm getting matches off
name and e-mail address, and even company I think. People complained
that the newer version's contact search was limiting, but it seems to
me it's gotten back to the better search they say it had before.

--

Henry Kissinger - "The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."

[Sean Murphy]

    Well that's kind of cool. Thanks Zack, I hadn't spotted that.

-Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...

[mafa]

Hi!

Sadly neither HTML view or "older version" brings back the suggested
contacts view. As I do write alot of mails to people who I don't need/
want in my contacts (student support here...) I'd really need to
delete the suggested contacts from time to time. Merging wouldn't help
in this case.

Thanks for your ideas anyway, wouldn't have thought of that...

On 10 Feb., 23:44, Sean Murphy <smpara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>     Interesting. I just checked and I see the same amendment. I read about a
> new feature that was just rolled out, allowing us to merge duplicate
> contacts - this change must be related to that. Since I gave up on going
> through and deleting unhelpful Suggested Contacts a while ago, it won't
> affect me, but perhaps if you change to a reduced function like "Old
> Version" or "HTML" it might bring Suggested Contacts back for you, maybe?
> Probably not, but I can't think of any other way. Perhaps you could change
> your routine from deleting Suggested Contacts to merging Duplicate Contacts?
> It would basically be the same thing.
>
> -Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...
>

[Nick Chirchirillo]

From what I've seen, if you click the "My Contacts" group with no contact selected, a button will be there that says something like "view suggestions".  This will make the "Suggested Contacts" group appear, much like how the "Search Results" group only appears when you are preforming a search.  However, they seemed to have also changed how contacts are suggested in the first place.  Now, you have to "contact them frequently".  I sent about 5 emails to another one of my other email addresses that I know is not in my contact list.  While the email address showed up with auto-complete, it never appeared in my contact list, suggested or regular.

--
-Nick

[mafa]

Thanks for the tipp!

When I click on "suggestions" there appears a "Suggested contacts"
group - but only with 15 people in it.

There is still a huge difference between "My contacts" (286) and "All
contacts" (more than 400). When I browser through the "All contacts"-
List some of the contacts (the earlier "suggested ones") have the
button "move to contacts", the other ones do not have it (it is greyed
out).

Argh.

[FreddieFenster]

It looks as though the view for Suggested Contacts is broken. It never
shows any contacts. I've tried mulitple accounts and multiple
browsers.

I noticed this when I first setup sync or it could also have been when
they rolled out merge contacts feature, both were on the same day. I
really can't believe they can release stuff as badly broken as this.

> > -Nick- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Zack (Doc)]

When I click suggest, I get some contacts, so it's not completely broken.

And not to sound too rude, but Freddie, what part of "Beta" didn't you
recognize? We should expect things to be "released" to us that might
be buggy, that's why we're the testers.

--

Ernest Hemingway - "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest
thing I know."

[FreddieFenster]

You don't honestly think gmail is a true beta? It's been in 'beta'
for almost 5 years dude and it's now got almost 30 million users and a
product they charge for. I can understand things not working in gmail
labs, they are experimental features worthy of the beta tag. But
something as basic as the address book, that's core functionality and
it should work as expected - it did before.

Just look at what they did with Chrome and its beta tag, to see that
Google's categorising of 'beta' products is a joke.

> thing I know."- Hide quoted text -

[Nick Chirchirillo]

As long as the beta tag is on the logo, I will believe that it is a true beta product.  How long was Google itself beta?

The product they charge for, are you talking about the paid version of Google Apps?  Because people pay for that service, it doesn't get new features until we have extensively tested it first to work out all the bugs.

I'm also with Zack.  I don't notice anything not working with the contact list.  However, the suggested contacts list is NOT a core function of an address book.  I believe it's a GMail exclusive feature that automatically checks any email address you send an email to against all the contacts in your contacts and adds it if it doesn't match any.  I think they keep making changes to the feature to make it less...annoying.  Personally, I would like them to make that an option, but it looks like you now have to send several emails to a non-contact before they will be added to the suggested list.

Take a look in the All Contacts list.  See if the contacts that used to be in "Suggested" are in there.  It seems that when they made the last set of changes to the contact manager, regular contacts and suggested contacts were merged together.

--
-Nick

[Sean Murphy]

    It was only added late last year, wasn't it? Added AFTER Labs in fact, unless my memory is mixed-up. So that would make Suggested Contacts definitively a "True Beta" by the standards implied in FreddieFenster's post...

-Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...

[FreddieFenster]

No, my definition of labs was experimental features that could be
considered beta. If Suggested Contacts was an experimental feature it
should have gone into labs first. But whatever, if you think it's
fine to call it beta and then go ahead. You never hear Google using
the beta excuse when something doesn't work as expected, so why do
you?

Getting back to my original problem: I have 201 contacts in All
Contacts, and 195 in My Contacts. When I click on Suggested Contacts
there are no contacts returned. So for me to find the suggested
contacts I would need to identify each, one by one. This happens on
my primary account, my other account and my google apps account, so
for me this feature is broken.

On Feb 12, 5:44 am, Sean Murphy <smpara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>     It was only added late last year, wasn't it? Added AFTER Labs in fact,
> unless my memory is mixed-up. So that would make Suggested Contacts
> definitively a "True Beta" by the standards implied in FreddieFenster's
> post...
>
> -Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...
>

> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 23:11, Nick Chirchirillo <nickma...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > However, the suggested contacts list is NOT a core function of an address
> > book.  I believe it's a GMail exclusive feature that automatically checks
> > any email address you send an email to against all the contacts in your
> > contacts and adds it if it doesn't match any.  I think they keep making
> > changes to the feature to make it less...annoying.  Personally, I would like
> > them to make that an option, but it looks like you now have to send several

> > emails to a non-contact before they will be added to the suggested list.- Hide quoted text -

[Nick Chirchirillo]

Doesn't that confirm my suspicion that in the latest round of "contact manager changes" the contacts that were once in suggested simply got merged with All Contacts?  That doesn't sound like anything is broken, rather they did something that should not have been done.  Having to look through 200 names for the six that you don't recognize doesn't seem like it's a big deal.  Granted, it is annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, it's something that can be easily fixed.

When you click the "View Suggestion" button and get sent to the suggested group, the intro to the group says "These are the people you have contacted frequently."  That leads me to believe that you have to send an email to a non-contact SEVERAL times before they will be added (I posted my theory a few posts ago).

--
-Nick

[Herchu]

YESSS!!!!!
You are right. Thanks for mentioned it, I haven't noticed by myself.
(Reckon I was one of the moaners, heh...)

On 11 feb, 00:01, "Zack (Doc)" <z...@tnan.net> wrote:
> It seems they "fixed" the search at the same time.  I went in to
> research your post Sean and found it harder to find the duplicates
> I've previously had to do a merge with.  While doing so, I discovered
> that when I type in the contact search box I'm getting matches off
> name and e-mail address, and even company I think.  People complained
> that the newer version's contact search was limiting, but it seems to
> me it's gotten back to the better search they say it had before.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 17:44, Sean Murphy <smpara...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >     Interesting. I just checked and I see the same amendment. I read about a
> > new feature that was just rolled out, allowing us to merge duplicate
> > contacts - this change must be related to that. Since I gave up on going
> > through and deleting unhelpful Suggested Contacts a while ago, it won't
> > affect me, but perhaps if you change to a reduced function like "Old
> > Version" or "HTML" it might bring Suggested Contacts back for you, maybe?
> > Probably not, but I can't think of any other way. Perhaps you could change
> > your routine from deleting Suggested Contacts to merging Duplicate Contacts?
> > It would basically be the same thing.
>
> > -Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...
>

[Ryan Morehart]

They probably added it in very, very recently:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/four-changes-to-gmail-contacts.html

Ryan

[Nick Chirchirillo]

Freddie, I must apologize.  I just did some testing and saw that while non-contacts are still being added to "All Contacts", it would appear that they are not added to "Suggested Contacts".  This it seems to have reverted back to the original way that GMail handled these "contacts".  I just filed a bug report with GMail, and I suggest you do the same.  This is the link that I used to fill out the report https://mail.google.com/support/bin/bin/request.py?direct=1&group=bugflow_contactsnewbug&trouble_type=contacts.  If for some reason that doesn't work, I clicked Known Issues from the main help center page, then at the bottom there are instructions on what to do if the issue you are having is not listed there.

--
-Nick