I don’t need so many contacts

I was testing a free beta cobook – the smart Address Book app for Mac. It helps you if you are really a social animal. It pulls your contacts from your favorite social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Voice and place them with your contacts in the Mac Address Book. The app gives contact information of your friends as soon as you type.

I connected to my accounts in Facebook and LinkedIn, I regretted later on.

On my iPhone I use contacts from my gmail account, not iCloud. For some reasons that I don’t know I already have some contacts in the Address Book of my Mac as well as in my iCloud account. Since I never used my Address Book app on my Mac I took a look at the preference.

How great, I could also pull in contacts from Google account, let me do that as well, harmless right?

What I ended up was thousands of contact from various places and there were lots of duplicates and contact information of hundreds of people that I don’t need in my Mac. Thanks for the genius in Google, if I follow someone on Google plus the name and Google plus profile of that person are automatically added to my Gmail contacts. I didn’t ask for that but I wasn’t offered a choice! I don’t actually need that on my Mac!

Lucky that I didn’t sync cobook with my Twitter account or else I’ll have 150 more contact information of people that I will never make contact with.

My next regret was turning on Contacts for my iCloud account on my iPhone. The allows iCould to sync contacts with my other i-devices such as Address Book on my Mac. My iPhone was flooded with names that I don’t need.

The above is the preference of Address Book which I could select what to show, either iCloud or “On my Mac”, Apple design is always very intuitive but I just can’t get this. Once the Address Book on the Mac is sync’ed with iCloud why do I need a separate display for those contact “On my Mac”? Isn’t that everyone wants one set of contacts to be available in all their i-devices?

I ended up dropping cobook into AppCleaner, removed hundreds of duplicate contacts and names/email address/plus.google profile of those people that I followed.

A bit of statistic at the end, after the cleanup I have about 800 contacts, about a hundred are restaurent names, 70% others are those people that have either left the industry that I’m in, retired, left town or dead. For old time sake those names remained in my contacts.

Now I realize I only need about a hundred contacts. By the way I could prioritize OSX’s spotlight to search names in Address Book so I don’t need any new app just for contacts.

Contacts, useful ones, I don’t need many!