Ever since getting an Android phone, I've become obsessed with properly syncing all my contacts. All the comapnies are fighting each other for properietary control of your life, so they just aren't playing nice with each other. I've been trying all sorts of apps, hacks, imports/exports, desktop software, plugins. I'm like 70% of the way there, but still a long way to go.
The goal:
Have a central place where all your contacts are managed. This place sends (syncs) the information to wherever...Android phone, google contacts, outlook contacts. All information...meaning profile photos from facebook, business numbers from linkedin, normal contacts from google, etc.
Here's the issue:
Facebook has the best profile photos.
Linkedin has business info other places don't.
Google contacts needs to get the final version of all the info because that's the most reliable way to get it on your phone.
Outlook is a good place to manage things centrally since it's on the desktop and has a rich featureset.
Problem with Outlook is that the scoial connectors to facebook and linkedin aren't really working.
So maybe you can get a third party tool that works with all of them, set it up, sync it to outlook, and outlook syncs it to google.
There's a good google-to-outlook sync. So if I can get everything in Outlook, that would be great. This is where I'm currently stuck.
Another more difficult option is using an app on the phone that will sync things, and then getting that information back on the computer, fixing little details there, and sending it back to the phone. The problem with this is that the apps that do this, do it in a weird way. They don't necessarily sync the details...it's more like they allow you to see them on the same screen. In other words, the google contacts still shows just the google contacts info, but on the phone it looks like you have more info because it's reading things from the facebook app. It's just a trick.
Anyway, ugh.
