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Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

88 points raleighm | 1 comments | 19 Oct 24 04:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | source

How do people sync and manage contacts across so many apps and contexts?

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UPDATE: Thanks for the comments so far. To clarify my situation:

My main use cases are: Gmail (personal): For personal contacts. Gmail (work): For professional contacts related to my role. Outlook (work): For internal and external business communication. LinkedIn: Managing professional connections. Messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.): Keeping in touch with a wide range of contacts.

I’ve tried syncing across these platforms using Google Contacts, vCard exports, and a few automation tools, but the results have been inconsistent. Either the syncing doesn't work as expected, or there’s a lot of manual cleanup involved—especially when contacts change roles or details across different apps.

I’m wondering if anyone has found a more seamless way to manage contacts across all these different contexts? I’d love to hear any recommendations for more advanced tools, automations, or strategies that have worked for you.

1. zvr ◴[23 Oct 24 21:50 UTC] No.41929575[source]▶
I look every few years to see whether there is a solution for me, but unfortunately I have not found anything.

Among all the people I interact with, the only set of contacts that I do not need to save their info is co-workers in the same company; the enterprise-wide LDAP (ActiveDirectory in this case) has everything.

My functional requirements that I have not found anything to satisfy them:

I have different devices and clients, and some contacts only make sense on one (or some) of the devices. It would be ideal if the sync process could use some group/tag and operate on a subset of all data. I have not found this anywhere and essentially gave up on this, willing to live with having all data in all places.

Another point is data shared amongst contacts: many employees of company X share the same work address; or married couple John and Jane share the same home address and the same landline phone. If I duplicate the info and this phone rings me up, which name should be displayed as caller?

In the end, I use a completely self-made setup. Data are entered via text files in a custom markup, then translated into graph data (RDF to be exact) and stored in a data store. Export to VCF (among other formats) helps with importing the data into a CardDAV server, from where all device/client sync.

I would love to find something that will allow me to abandon this setup, but nothing is there yet.