Sunny Wu’s Blogging Zone

How can Google Apps attract more small businesses and enterprises to come on board without a management feature for the most fundamental asset in communication?
What is the most important thing on my mobile phone? Sim card? No, Address Book. What is the most important thing in my Gmail account other than the emails? Email addresses on my Contact List.

Now how can I keep my mobile phone’s Address Book and my Gmail contact list consistently and merge into a unified and consistent address book? I can’t.

Hang on, you would say I could synchronize my phone’s address book onto Microsoft Outlook and then export a csv file onto Gmail, or vice versa in reverse, right? No. I can’t. It’s too hard. I’m too lazy to. Do you always meet a bunch of people in one go and exchange addresses every once in a while only in life?

If you look around, there were people attempting to achieve the holy grail of Contact Synchronization here, here and here with Gmail but they all ultimately cannot get around the missing synchronization feature and could not have the same ending as the Da Vinci’s Code.

Mobile phone and sim card are replaceable. Emails can be deleted (remember the good old 4MB Hotmail storage limits?). But without your contacts, you cant call, can’t email and can’t even drive to a friend’s place (not everyone is on Facebook you know…)

Google Apps, which is my daily “Web OS” tool that manage my domain emails (thru Gmail), calendars and documents, do not provide Contacts Synchronization even for PAID accounts. No matter what positive message the slogan on its front page is being sent across, the lack of proper contact synchronization capability is the massive Achilles’ heels of such service to even attract small businesses.

At the age where we can have gigabytes of email storage, access to our emails from anywhere around the world through an Internet browser, the death of Desktop RSS feed readers and the raising popularity of online feed readers, it is quite disappointing that we still need to rely on a desktop application (Outlook or Address Book on Mac) for contact management mediator.

Actually, if you look around, Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail is in a similar state in terms of the continuous disregard of critical user data - Contacts.

Missing Benefits for Google

Considering the importance of contextual advertising in the search engine market and also the reliance of personalization techniques in order to produce more informative ads, geographical and relationship information such as job title, physical addresses and phone numbers (area code) can be very useful data to improve the advertisement’s relevance and quality to the users. Hence making people upload their contacts easily should be as important as the easiness of mail thread reading, friendly AJAX-enabled user interface and generous initial email storage which all made Gmail so appealing when it was rolled out back in 2004.

Message

Please Google/Yahoo/Microsoft, give us a Contact Synchronization API, especially Google Apps. Let us have our own Web 2.0 Address Book.

What do you think? Do you have similar need as well? If so, please leave a message in the comments so I can be certain that I’m not the only mad person that would appreciate such a feature.