Sharing Contacts
My wife and I merged our contacts list yesterday. I was wary of the consequences, but it was the easiest way to get our shared info synced and neither of us minded the bloat from getting each others’ names. We sync like this: her phone <-> her Yahoo acct <-> Address Book on our shared Mac <-> my Google acct <-> my phone. Address Book is the bridge in that data flow, because it allows synching multiple accounts (although only one Yahoo and one Google, not multiple of each).
I was surprised to find that Gmail’s Contacts sub-app doesn’t have a way to share a subset of your contacts except via import/export. We’ve been very happy with Google Calendar’s ability to share calendars. I think a mesh of shared and guaranteed-up-to-date contact details is something that social networks are going to offer in the near future. Google is partway there through G+. LinkedIn has been a really good source of up-to-date email addresses for me synced to my phone, so I see this as a good initial step.
Are you saying you want a continuous sync of a subset of contacts or export a subset; I believe you can do the later.
Mohamed Jamal – continuous sync. The goal is that we only have to do the data entry at most once among us and among all of our devices.
Gotcha. I’ve had a similar issue trying to sync my family’s address books where we have some overlapping circles and keeping those contacts in sync is a manual process. Hopefully Vic Gundotra has something up his sleeve in the near future to solve this problem.