2 Fat Dads

Google Merge Dupes in Bulk

Welcome to The Cloud, where you can sync your address book on your MacBook to your BlackBerry, your iPod Touch and even your work laptop if you feel really adventurous and like to cross your streams. The problem is that while in theory this should work fine, anyone who has even owned a Palm III will tell you that different machines treat address books differently and that synchronizing data is more of an act of faith than an exact science. In my case sync my gadgets up has been more like a Dark Art resulting in 21 of my contacts creating 90 duplicates each on a weekly basis. I had tended to my address book vigilantly like a farmer to his crops in Facebook’s annoying as hell Farmville until I had to give for sanity’s sake. I even nuked my whole address book on all devices a few times and attempted to restore them form a saved contact sheet in my Google Docs. Alas It was pointless, Anne, the two Bills, and our entire Quebec City office just kept multiplying like Tribbles in the worlds biggest game of: “Piss off the nice Canuck”. So I let them build up until this morning when I read this post on The Official GMail Blog, at this point those 21 troubles makers had reproduced 440 times each leaving me with just over 9301 duplicates in my address book. The result is that over the past few weeks the iPod Touch’s Address Book would simply crash, GMail Contact look up was a real chore to load even for a speed demon like Chrome and the Google Contact sync had to be disabled form fear of succumbing to hip dysplasia due the incessant vibrations alerting me to potential duplicates after each sync.


Continue reading Google Contacts Finally Addresses Dupes Bloat Issue