PSA: Deleting Contacts from Gmail Auto-Complete

The way Gmail remembers email addresses you have replied to, even if you did not actually add that person to your Contacts, is a standard, convenient feature of email clients. But the way Gmail NEVER forgets an address is really a problem, when one of your correspondents changes their email address. It is all to easy to take what the auto-complete offers, and send to an old email address.

After one too many social mishaps, I took the initiative to figure out how to solve this problem. The solution turns out to be pretty straightforward, but not easy to find--I came across a few less-effective approaches, before I found this one.

The key to the solution is knowing that Google exposes the ad-hoc contacts within an automatically populated "OTHER" group, within the Contacts app. So the solution boils down to--delete all of the OTHER contacts.

Here is the step-by-step:

1. Open Google Contacts (this will work much better with a computer & browser than mobile device).
2. Scroll and select the OTHER group of Contacts.
3. See years/decades worth of old email addresses & contact names.
4. Spend as much time as you like scrolling down memory lane.
5. When ready, start selecting for deletion.

Unfortunately, there is no SELECT ALL button. The best work-around is to click the first contact, scroll down to the last contact, and shift-click. That will select everything in between first and last.

Also in my experience, the deletion is really slow (maybe that is why no SELECT ALL button!), so be patient.

(I wouldn't worry too much that you will lose some valuable contact. If you really do need to find contact info for the lawn guy you last emailed 8 years ago, you can always just search your email. But if you are worried, you could do some form of export or Google Takeout first.)

_________________

This is begging for some intelligence on Google's part. Short of that, it would help if the list told you when a contact was last used. Better yet, offer to clean up anything older than X months. And instead of a hard-delete, place it in an archive--where the archive is walled-off from showing up in auto-complete.

It would also be nice to be able to delete/archive a given contact on-the-fly. E.g., when you type "smit..." and Smitty Johnson that you last emailed 12 years ago appears, have an option to click an expansion menu and insta-delete that one. I believe Outlook works this way.

Google Calendar Feature Idea: Filter Recurring

 I tend to use Google calendar for a lot of recurring reminders (renew drivers license, perform monthly maintenance tasks, etc, etc). I would like a UI affordance to toggle my view to show All - Recurring Only - Non-Recurring Only.

Reminder Feature for Google Calendar

When receiving notifications (especially email notifications), include an option for "terminate any more notifications for this event". 

Google Not Updating Their Apps?

Microsoft is notorious for not improving the applications, unless and until competitors light a fire under them. There are features in Access and Outlook that have been flawed for more than a decade. Oh sure, Microsoft releases new versions, but they mostly add new features that nobody wants, without fixing/enhancing the stuff that really needs it. I am getting a little concerned that Google is showing similar signs.

Gmail is pretty good and has gotten some updates. But Contacts is pretty bare-bones, even though it has been around for years. Calendar is more full-featured, but doesn't seem to be improving very quickly. The Calendar feature that started me thinking about this is Reminders--frankly, they are terrible. And Reminder are not a niche feature--they are core to Calendar functionality. People rely on them. At a minimum, Google needs to allow you to snooze reminders an arbitrary amount of time. Almost as important is aggregating the Reminders, like Microsoft started doing in Outlook 2003. So you don't have 12 reminders windows open--you have 1 scrolling window, displaying 12 reminders.

Here is a bonus idea for Google--include the concept of "Travel Time" with appointments. So if you have a 1-2 appt that takes 15 minutes to get to and from, your calendar would sandwich the actual appointment in between 15-minute travel blocks, formatted in a visually obvious way. That way, I would no longer confuse myself, trying to remember "Was the appointment really at 12:45, or did I add 15 minutes for travel time to a 1:00 appointment?".

And here is another one. A great feature of Google Calendars is the virtual, aggregated view, which shows  family member's appointments, each color-coded, superimposed on your own calendar. It is a very common thing to create events that involve those same people. In other words, your events show up on both your calendar, and theirs. Especially if you have a family view that involves more than 2 calendars, this creates A LOT of clutter. So a very obvious feature would be to allow, or visually depict, suppression of the redundant events on your family calendars.

Blogger Feature: Abandoned Posts Functionality

Sometimes I start a post and decide never to finish it. Often, because I have discovered some flaw in my reasoning. Still, I hate to discard anything I have taken the time to write--as with saving all email messages, you just never know which thing you may want for some reason in the future. My work-around in Blogger is to assign such un-published items to an "Abandoned" category. But that will cause them to still accumulate and get in the way when reviewing the backlog of un-published posts (I tend to have a lot of those). I would like to see built-in system functionality for hiding posts in the "Abandoned" category.

SharePoint should work more like Google Docs

One big problem with SharePoint is that the permissions have to be provided at a macro level, in advance, by the SharePoint admin. In cross-functional projects at large companies, this makes it inconvenient to use SharePoint for the ad-hoc workgroups that often get pulled together in big companies. So what happens?--business as usual, i.e., passing around email versions, getting mixed up as to what is current, and generally clogging the Exchange server with large attachments.

Google docs works so much better. You create a document, and then invite people to collaborate. You can set rules that allow or disallow your invitees from inviting others.

On The Fly Price Comparison

two companies showed off their Android applications. Big in Japan showed ShopSavvy, a neat tool that scans a bar code and then searches the web and local stores for the same item

That's a pretty good idea. I have thought something like that would be useful when considering a purchase. If you aren't tuned in to the price point for an item you are considering purchasing (probably as an impulse), you can very quickly get a readout on what is a good price. Of course, as with so many things, the business model seems like a great big question mark.

We Need Better Teleconferencing Software!

Introduction

I work for a very large, very distributed company. For the first time in my career, I find that most of my meeting time is spent in teleconferences, rather than in-person meetings. Although I miss the face-to-face contact, I do think it is clear that teleconferencing will only become more prevalent, driven by various developments: distributed workforces, off-shoring and out-sourcing, and telecommuting.

Considering how critical teleconferencing is to getting work done for the contemporary knowledge-worker, I am rather shocked by the deep mediocrity of the technology. My employer uses AT&T Teleconference Services, which I have used for years at other companies, and it really hasn't improved AT ALL over time. Same old problems: everybody has to introduce themselves, and then hear a repetition of all the other people on the call; if someone puts you on hold, the rest of the conference gets serenaded with their PBX's muzak (I know there is an advanced feature that prevents this--nobody ever uses it); security problems if you have back-to-back calls on the same number, when the early joiners for the next meeting unintentionally "barge" into the meeting that hasn't yet ended. The fact that these old, well-known problems continue to be tolerated--never mind the failure to introduce cool new features--shows me a product category ripe for innovation.

What is needed--beyond a teleconferencing provider who cares enough about their product to continually improve it--is convergence between teleconferencing and web conferencing. In the admittedly limited sample of big companies I have experience with, web conferencing really has not taken off as one would expect. We probably have 10 teleconferences for every 1 web conference. Granted, there may be some discussions that simply do not benefit from any visuals, but as often than not, I find that there is inevitably a point in the teleconference where it would be very convenient to display something.(Maybe I shouldn't complain though--I have a long commute, and when possible, try to combine it with conference calls) In fact, we frequently wind up quickly emailing documents for the participants to review.

There are probably a few reasons for the under-use of web conferencing, but I think one big one is the tedium of scheduling them. I have used both LiveMeeting and Webex, and they both require meetings to be set up in advance, and the meeting URLs have to be distributed to all the participants. Ironically, ease of initiation is the one area where teleconferencing really shines, since there is no setup whatsoever required--just dial in to a well-known, persistent number and access code (unfortunately, there are some security problems associated with that, which we will get to shortly).

If teleconferencing and web conferencing could be tightly integrated, I think all the existing problems of both could be solved, and valuable new features added. An inventory of the improvements I envision is listed below:

Web conferencing is initiated automatically with the teleconference, and vice-versa

Just as employees receive their own, individual access code to the master teleconference number, so would they receive a standing URL for web conferencing.

As a bonus, teleconference/web conference addresses would be discoverable, for authorized individuals (see Security section for more discussion).

See who is currently connected, along with who was invited

Instead of taking an oral roll call, you can see who is connected. I bet introductions and roll-call takes a 5% productivity toll on teleconferencing time. So as mundane as this problem is, solving it would have a big payoff. Bonus feature--you automatically get a log of who was on the call, and even when they were on.

"Ping" invitees who have not signed on (via IM or phone call or email)

Another big time-waster is the need to "ping" the people who were invited but still haven't joined in 5 minutes after the start of call. Integration wouldn't completely make this go away, but it could make it easier--instead of manually adding their names to an IM or email, you could just click-select and invoke the "are you joining us" message. Bonus--an option for pinging could be a phone call with a pre-recorded message.

Display who is currently speaking

This feature would be very nice, though admittedly it would take some real technology, not just more integration. Still, it's value would not be insignificant--it can be very,very challenging in a large conference call to track the identity of the speaker.

Better security

Another thing that surprises me about all the corporations I have been at that use teleconferencing is the obliviousness to the gaping security hole. Since access codes NEVER change, anyone who gets one can join any call at any time. And given the lack of functionality, it can be very difficult to count and track all the beeps (not to mention, with quick-start calls, if the lurker is the first person in, they will be even harder to detect).

I would envision a layered security approach. There would be an option to provide a one-time URL for a given meeting. There would also be integration with network-based identity-management capability.

Bonus feature: for those occasions where the teleconference host won't be able to attend, instead of having to hand out one's standard host access code to a delegate, the ability to generate a one-time access code.

Conference Initiated But On Hold

I have worked in many different companies, and they all suffer, in varying degrees, from the problem of arriving late to meetings. To address this problem, the software needs to allow the conference to be initiatied but placed on hold (this enhances personal productivity, since participants won't feel obliged to engage in small talk while inevitably waiting 5 minutes beyond the appointed meeting time to have a quorum of participants available). The way this differs from current technology is that the leader, and even the participants, will have visibility to who has called in. That way, the leader can determine when a quorum has been reached, and at that point can take everybody off hold and into conference.

As a bonus, participants have the option to "break hold", if they want to talk as a subset. The key point is that everybody knows who is on the call, even if they haven't broken in to introduce themselves, as would be necessary with the current technology.

Auto disconnect web conferencing when done

A security problem I have noticed with web conferencing is that it is easy to forget to disconnect. Integrated software could have pop-up reminders, initiated when the participant terminates the call, if they are still logged in as a presenter on the web conference.

Icing On the Cake

Of course, a modern, integrated conferencing system would not have stupid anti-features, such as:

• Inadvertently and embarassingly subjecting the rest of the teleconference to music when you put them on hold to take another incoming call.
• Hanging up when you mean to take yourself off mute (inadvertent hang-up being an anti-feature of almost all current telephones)

Farther Into the Future

• Development of an applet for mobile phones that provides most or all of the above features.
• The development of full "telepresence".

CONCLUSION

The current state of teleconferencing reminds me of the state of web search or webmail before Google jumped in: minimally adequate, but long neglected, ripe for innovation and integration. In the short-term, it seems like some of the features I envision would require a highly integrated corporate PBX. In the long term, I hope they could be achieved via off-the-shelf handsets, or at a minimum, via standard cell phones.

Google Detail Missed: Root Words and Sub-Strings

In so many ways, Google search hits all the little details--hyphens and other spaces between words, mis-spellings. But they seem to completely ignore root words. Search for "computer" when your target contains "computers", and you come up empty. Same thing with numbers: "quality" instead of "quality1", and you lose.

This problem gets me surprisingly often. I notice it most when searching my own Gmail, because in those cases, I KNOW the item is there to be found, and that prompts me to pay attention and refine my search till I get it right.

An unusal miss for Google.

Common Property for Google Widgets: What to Open

I'm slowly getting hooked on the iGoogle personal, configurable homepage. I would like to see the different widgets all have a common, settable property for how to "open" when expanded. Mostly this choice would be New Tab vs. New Window (assuming current tabbed browser editions); could include a pop-up small-browser; and where applicable, "custom default" (as for Google reader, where it has the lovely pop-up).