Facebook Contacts Clutter Up the Palm Pre
I am readying myself to have a real, live breathing Palm Pre in my hands in just a few days. OK, I’m kidding on the breathing part (I hope). I have been giving a lot of thought to how I would use the Pre in my daily routine as more information about how it works has come available. One of the areas that I admit is bothering me has to do with the Synergy technology, which has to be one of the Pre’s best features. The seamless way it integrates my personal data across programs makes a lot of sense and is groundbreaking in a way. According to information about how it works, it may end up cluttering my contacts on the Pre if not set up correctly.
One of the most innovative features of the WebOS is Synergy, which pulls your information from all over the phone and from the web and brings it to the programs on the phone. It will grab your contacts from Exchange, Gmail and online services, and pull them together on the phone for easy access. The problem is that if you are like me, then you have a lot of Facebook friends that you don’t really know. I must have hundreds of them, as friending new people was the thing to do when Facebook was first taking off. Friends are good, right? Not on the Pre, if you don’t really know them.
Synergy on the Pre will grab all of your Facebook friends and pull them right into your phone contact list. That means I will end up with hundreds of contacts on my phone that I don’t know. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t know someone, I don’t want them cluttering up my contact list. What is not clear is if this contact list will sync with Google Contacts, which if so, then before I know it, I will have people I don’t know all over my information, and not just on the Pre. The only way it seems to avoid that is to either “unfriend” them (is that even a word?) on Facebook or prevent Synergy from pulling them in the first place. That’s easy enough, but I have a nagging feeling that it’s turning off an innovative technology, and that grates on me a little.
(via preCentral)
So wait, does that mean that you can’t go through and delete contacts individually from the phone, without deleting the contact from the source (i.e. facebook)?
You can but I would think it syncs again with Facebook and other services all the time. It would just put it back I would think. We’ll know for sure next week though.
Delete all the people that aren’t REALLY your friends on facebook, waaallaaa, problem solved. DDD!
Why do you think it is ok to have contact in facebook’s list and not on the palm pre?
ignorance breeds fear
If, say, two years from now I decide I want to rekindle a friendship with my bff from second grade, facebook is perfect for a casual “hey, let’s be friends again” wallpost. Will I want to call this person directly within the next few months and initiate a very awkward conversation? No. I’m with JK on this one…. and I’d still like an answer to my first question.
…and so when that time comes, do a quick search on FB, find the person and send them a message.
This sounds like a job for a check box. I would think that you’d be able to turn this off in a settings window.
It might useful to search the leaked 300+ page guide.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/28/palm-pre-user-guide-the-highlights-so-far/
The pre doesn’t just pull all of your facebook contacts, it links the contacts you have on your phone to their facebook profile. So basically the entire point of this article is over something that won’t happen with synergy.
Marques: That suggests that if you have contact info for someone only in Facebook, that contact will not be synced, ie. ANY Facebook friend that did not appear in your phone already would still not appear. That would make Synergy really stupid.
No, I think what may work out is if they had a Pre Facebook widget available, and then you’d select on the Facebook webpage which contacts you want synced. That seems to be the easiest way to keep things manageable, and since you could use any browser to do it, not terribly inconvenient.
I agree that it probably doesn’t work the way that Marques described, but that wouldn’t be altogether bad if it did. I use an Outlook plugin called Xobni that does that: A person emails me – any person, even somebody not in my contact list – and Xobni immediately finds them on Facebook and adds their profile pic to their Xobni contact info. It also shows me their Facebook status updates. If Synergy worked like this, I probably wouldn’t mind, though I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.
I have a strong fear for the future of the human race after reading through comments and actual news articles on the Pre.
Has no one ever used the built in contact search that’s available on almost every phone?
And why on Earth would Palm force you to store information you don’t want?
So let me get this straight… You are ok with “friending” someone on Facebook you don’t know, which allows them to read all of your and your friends personal thoughts daily, peruse through your photos and look at your personal details such as email address, phone number, address etc… However, you are somehow concerned once THEIR phone number shows up in your contact list??
I don’t know about anyone else, but it seems like your priorities are backwards. Personally, I see no problem with having any of my friends on facebook in my contact list on my phone. True, there are some that I would never call, but then you never know. I actually “know” my friends on facebook.
And while this may add a lot of numbers I may never use, I look them up by name, so I’m not really going to be thumbing through them one by one anyways. I’d rather have them there in case I ever need them than not. And I love that they are all on one contact list so I only have one place to look for phone numbers.
Err, let me get this straight: you’ve never heard of Limited Profile and privacy settings? You don’t have any casual acquaintances? Or folks you only talk to through Facebook messages? Just because I have someone I have friended doesn’t mean I need to reach them by phone.
thanks bluemonq, my thoughts exactly.
Err, are you stupid? I think I mentioned there are plenty of people I would never call on my facebook list. However, it’s not a big deal as it looks pretty darn easy to navigate to your desired contact in the contact list. If that is too difficult for you, I just wouldn’t sync your facebook to your contacts.
For those of you who refuse to read any further.
Smart-phone does not mean it knows your username and password to access facebook.
If it is really that scary for you, and you don’t know how to search/sort you contacts by entering in the first few letters of their name…..don’t set it up.
Shawn..do you know anything about Facebook?? Many applications/games require you to have your game members as your Facebook friends in order to fully utilize all features of the game (one being Mafia Wars). You can create a separate friends list and set the privacy to where friends in this list can not read the majority of your wall posts! Drop the holier-than-thou attitude about friending people you don’t know. If you do not understand the app…shut up.
Sounds like you are like me in the sense of having too many friends that you don’t even know who they are on facebook. Well if that’s the case, why would you synchronize to facebook? if it were me, i am going to synchronize through my gmail account which has contacts that i keep in touch on a regular basis. Then, if i know those people have a facebook profile, link to it. remember that you have options on the pre as to tell it whether you want to save it on ur palm profile or keep it on synergy mode. i think you are making the process seem more ovewhelming that what it was meant to be.
hello i just wana chat but the stupid faCEBOOK DOESNT WANA GO ON MY STUPID COMPUTER AT MY STUPID COLLEGE AND I DONT EVEN HAVE STUPID CONTACTS
I didn’t realize my comment was so provocative. I was asking a question about a feature of a phone… not inviting a debate about the sociological significance of networking blabbity blah. Save it for your poli sci discussion group at Nobodycares State.
I don’t see what difference it makes. I have ALL kinds of people in my Google contacts that I don’t know, but do I care? No. Do I feel the need to remove all these people who I have no idea of who they are? No. Why? Because Google has made it easy to enter their email address into a new email… you don’t have to find them in a list. You just start typing any part of their contact information, like first name or last name or email address, or company name and Google narrows your list of contacts as you type. Typically, it only takes 2 or 3 keystrokes to find the person you’re looking for. VERY easy, no matter how many useless contacts you have. The Pre is supposed to work the same way, so who cares?
There seems to be a flaw in your understanding of Synergy. The phone doesn’t synch up with your Google account bidirectionally. From what I’ve read, it simply pulls in your Google contacts and Facebook contacts without altering the source. Within the phone, you merge them together. I’m thinking that if not at launch, very shortly thereafter there will be a large contact list which houses all of your merged contacts via synergy (not practical to scroll through, but good to have when paired with universal search to find a business contact or someone you know but don’t call often) and then a more intimate phone app that houses only the contacts that you’ve selected from the master list. This would be the people you call most often and will be a small enough list to scroll through with a one hand operation (no keyboard necessary).
I’ve read a few reviews on the Pre (well, the only few that exist right now). One mentioned that this was the default behavior, but that you can selectively turn off the contacts per service. In other words, you could have it pull in all your gmail contacts, but skip the Facebook ones. Remember… Palm employees have these and have used them. I’m sure at least one of them has befriended 100’s of people like you have and thought to bring this up.
Surely there is a way to sort, filter or group your contacts on the Pre. I store all my contacts in Outlook and break them into groups (which carries over to my iPhone). If the Pre doesn’t keep that group separation from Outlook, or at least allow you to filter by source, I would be surprised and quite disappointed.
Somebody at Palm must have been a Newton fan or Ex-Employee. Sounds Like Newton Soup
“The seamless way it integrates my personal data across programs makes a lot of sense and is groundbreaking in a way”
I think the proper term with the kids is “Defriended”
reminds me of Dilbert’s evil boss that wants to make his laptop lighter by deleting some documents.
Some of us are OCD and happen to like to keeping the address books on our phone clutter-free
I bet that there are lot of people out there like that. But whatever; I’ll just keep Facebook syncing turned off and manually add the couple dozen contacts from Facebook that I actually want on my phone. I just thought that considering how polished webOS was that they’d think about situations like this.
Honestly, it’s slightly annoying for me….. but with Universal Search, who’s ever going to be scrolling through all of their contacts anyway?
I hear the Palm Pre kicks puppies and steals money from your house! Come on people!
Someone mentions something on what they think may be right, and all of a sudden it becomes fact…
Relax, people… several points here…
1) The reason the Palm Pre is an evolutionary device is because we will no longer be using it simply as a ROLODEX, as with other phones. It literally will bring together the web with the world we physically come into contact with… hence the oft used term “SYNERGY”. So yeah, if you sync with Facebook, you’re gonna have a lot of contacts. But you don’t HAVE to sync with Facebook if you don’t want to!
2) Even if you DO populate your phonebook with tons of numbers (ie thru Facebook or Gmail), it’s not a problem! Why?
a. Universal search. Like it. Love it. Who the heck scrolls through allllll their contacts nowadays anyway? … besides iPhone users? Haha… Just type in the first couple letters of the person’s name and away you go. I use my Centro the very same way. Takes literally 2 seconds.
b. Speed dial. More conventional for you traditionalists, and you can use ANY QWERTY key to do it. Anyone out there have more than 26 people they need to call right away?
In my opinion, this phone is going to change the way we get in contact with the rest of the world… we’re no longer going to use our phones as Rolodexes, but to actually integrate the entire web right at our fingertips.
I’m assuming there will be an option to opt out of syncing with Facebook, because that is not an area that I need invading my phone space. I already have more people hidden than showing on my page now. I’ll probably just cancel the account altogether.
You all realize that you have to give the phone the info to connect to facebook right?
I know it’s a smart-phone, but I promise it won’t know your username and password.
Seriously dude, un-friend the people you don’t know. I have a BB Curve and when the Facebook App just upgraded with the ability to connect Facebook friends to my contact list, I actually loved it. I think it’s a great idea. As a user of several Palm Pilots in the past I’m looking forward to the Pre.
What i think is cool is it knows where you are with location based services and will show you if you are traveling phone $’s of any of your friends that are local at the time. Let’s say you are in Pittsburg on Vacation or traveling around and see hey my cousin that i havent seen lives here and here is their phone #I didn’t even think about that let me give them a call and say hello. Better yet i have friends that when they travel they want to stay at other friends places rather then pay for hotel. This way it woud show their contacts that live where they are going NICEEEEE
OK…if you need a phone to tell you that a friend lives where you are travelling, then you may not be close enough friends anymore to ask to crash with them to avoid paying for a hotel. I’m thinking you should only ask a friend if you can crash with them if you actually communicate with them a few times per year and know where they live.
WHY ARE THEY YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK IF YOU DON”T KNOW THEM?? That’s your fault not palm’s…
Would someone please explain why having some extra contacts from your facebook or gmail is a big deal? Because I don’t get it.
Look:
1) Why scroll through your contacts when you can instantly find someone in your contacts by simply typing the name?
I know iPhone didn’t have this feature for its first year, so maybe that’s why you got used to scrolling through hundreds of names just to make a call.
With pre, you just start typing (from the home screen or when in the contacts application) and you’ll find the person you want to call, IM, or email.
Who cares if there are 100 or 1000 contacts in the phone? You’ll never see the ones you’re not using anyway.
2) Organizing your facebook or google contacts just for the pre will be a waste of time.
See 1) above. Search, don’t organize. If they “fix” the Pre’s synchronizing feature so that it only syncs with certain lists you arrange in facebook, you’ll waste more time setting up those lists than you would searching by name using the Pre’s keyboard.
3) If it really really bothers you, just don’t synchronize with your online services, and you can use the Pre’s contacts list like it’s a cell phone from 1997. Except one with really fast search.
This article cracks me up and it just points to the fact as to why it is LAME to have 100’s of contacts on a facebook or myspace that you do not know. Having a big number on the website seemed like such great idea, but oh know, their now invading your phone and its an issue. I guess we all just need to be popular, well at least appear that way.
The Pre will be a great device, roll on the problems!
Okay after being frustrated for hours on just activating my palm pre, over 2 days worth of phone calls, chats and in store assistance, I then tried to bring my contact list from my old samsung instinct. Not a problem if you go to an actual store and they transfer your contacts. But BEWARE of best buys idea to backup your contact list to your palm pre, which you then connect to your home computer and upload onto a google account. IF ONLY IT WAS SO EASY. The contact list file is a csv, which is what you need for google to be able to import your contacts. But what they dont tell you is how UNFORMATED the information is. I had to delete so much information in the top column just to get the info to transfer, once it did, all the phone numbers were just in the notes, and i had to cut paste them into each contact individually. HOURS of work again. And once i added my hotmail contacts, well then the cluster of not needed information got too much! I had to select all my phone contacts that i actually wanted. Save them to a separate folder, then export that folder to a csv file, one that google made so all my info was saved correctly this time, no cut and paste neccessary. Then delete all the contacts so that my google account was cleared of all my extra email addys from hotmail, and import my saved google contact list. What a pain right? The phone does import without a way to screen or stop unwanted contact information from being transfered. The only way to keep that info from syncing is to delete the info from the account.
Just an idea- Create a new google account(or any sync able account), and insert ONLY the contacts you want on your pre. Then sync with that account only. Presto changeo should have only viable contacts.
With the Pre, you can choose which contacts show up and which one’s don’t. Go to contacts>preferences, and you can remove the facebook one. You can manage calendar, contacts, and email seperately; or let them all show up in all three.
Brian
You can’t delete them once they are in your contacts from facebook, you get a “can’t delete facebook profiles” message when you go into your contacts and try to delete one that came from Facebook. I assume that if I remove facebook as an account from within the contacts application then I will be able to delete them. I wonder then if it will keep my login info and automatically go straight to my page in facebook after I do that, not sure but I’m confident they will come up with a solution for it because it is a very common dilema.
I just created a FB Friends contact and then merged them all to it. It works great for the people your friends send joke emails to too and even for email addresses you’ve added to avoid spam filters. they stay there in case you ever need the info, but it’s out of the way and won’t come back into view.
Easily solved, just go to your contact list, click the drop down menu, hit preferences and accounts, select the account you wish to remove, and then all you do is remove the account. It will no longer show your facebook friends on your phone contact list unless you change the settings again at a later date.
I had a blackberry and I loved that I could select a friend and sync that person to fb with the phone being the ‘default’ rather than the fb. I think there should be a widget/app for those of us who dont like the clutter.
Best of both worlds
I do love my new pre, also loved my bb 
Don´t add you Facebook account on you Pre. So you problem is solved!