Google Gmail – Collect All Of Your Contacts

If you are a Google Gmail user, the search giant now has a new application that can round up all of your contacts and import them into the cloud. Called Google Contact Manager, the software can round up your contacts from popular email programs and other email systems such as Hotmail and bring them all into your Gmail account.

According to this entry on the Google site it states the following:

Today, my contact information is spread across various programs and devices. Some contacts are on my phone, some in Outlook, some in OS X Address Book and some in my Gmail auto-complete. This makes it challenging to communicate and collaborate with my friends, family and coworkers.

Now you can import your contacts from common places, in common formats, and manage them online in Google Contacts. We’ve enhanced the recently launched standalone contact manager to support importing contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail and Yahoo in CSV format, and OS X Address Book in vCard format. You can even add birthdays for all your contacts (a top user request).

With all your contact information in the cloud, you can view and manage your contacts by going to www.google.com/contacts whether you’re at an internet cafe, a friend’s house or on your iPhone. In addition, having your contacts in Google Contacts allows you to easily sync them to mobile phones, email them from Gmail, share documents with them in Docs, invite them to Calendar events, tag them in Picasa and do lots of other cool things on various Google apps.

If your organization uses Google Apps, access the standalone contact manager by going to www.google.com (replace “example.com” with the domain name you use) instead.

One important note: these import and management improvements are only available in the standalone contact manager. We’re working to make these improvements available in Gmail as soon as possible.

Give this new Gmail feature a try and see what you think.

Comments welcome.

Google Gmail Blog Site