Monday, June 29, 2009

Contact Counts on the Web Site

The detailed account status page has been enhanced to show more information about your Google contacts. We've found this to be handy when investigating reports from users who had either no contacts on their device, or the wrong number of contacts. Often there was confusion about which contacts, and how many should be syncing. The new information displayed on the web site should clear up the confusion:

The example above shows a user with 241 contacts in the 'My Contacts' pseudo-group at Google. This is the set of contacts that we sync. If a contact shows up under 'My Contacts', it should sync. If it doesn't, then it definitely won't sync. The default 'System' groups (Friends, Family etc) and two user-created groups (Test Group, Second Group) are displayed next. Contacts in these groups are always included in 'My Contacts' and so they will sync. The last group is the one formerly known as 'Suggested Contacts', and now labeled 'Most Contacted' at Google. By popular demand, we do not sync contacts in this group. So for this user, the total number of contacts that will sync is 241. Contacts in all of the groups except 'Most Contacted', will sync but they don't count towards the total because those contacts already accounted for under 'My Contacts'.
You can see the detailed account status page either by clicking the link in the troubleshooting page, or by clicking on the green/orange/red 'lights' in the main status page. If you're wondering why it takes a while to load, it's because we re-fetch your contact information from Google in real-time, to be sure the page shows up-to-date results.

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