This entry covers the shortfalls I see from the end user side.
Impact on End Users
In a manner typical of Google's strengths of collecting information to serve the user, its various platforms (Gmail, Android, etc) keep track of any contact-related information, whether or not it is directly tied to a "contact" in the sense of the word consistent with common practice (a record for a person explicitly added to an address book by reference or authored from scratch). To wit, if you send or receive an email, the email address of the other correspondent will be filed helpfully away, whether or not this person is a "contact" the user has explicitly created a record for. Similar steps are taken with other communications, such as explicitly dialed phone numbers or caller ID information encountered while using your Android phone, for instance. It scales out to just about any type of media you could come up with ... tweets, IMs, activity on Youtube, etc.
This is a helpful sort of initiative, serving the user in future by allowing Google to offer auto-completion service should the user start entering a familiar phone number or email address in another literally (in the sense I typed an address rather than a contact name) addressed communication, etc. However, it falls flat when Google takes the entire venture too far, and fails to recognize and honor a distinction between people the user truly cares about in a persistent manner and those who are merely "passing ships in the night".
For instance, my Gmail page has a presence-tracking chat list in the left column, peopled largely by random bozos spiced with a few truly chat-worthy people. This is substantially due to customers who sent me a single email inquiry regarding my Android app having been automatically tossed into there alongside friends I have known for 15 years and see regularly in real-world social situations. It turns out there is an option to disable this automatic function, but one has to wonder if the better default would not have been to differentiate those people I have explicitly created a contact record from those with whom Google senses I have had some interactions.
Worse things happen when I visit Gmail's (or Android's) contact apps, where we see that the line between who IS a contact versus who is NOT a contact is blurred to the point of erasure. Google generically calls all these people "contacts", and attempts to placate my concerns about this lumping-in by placing the true contacts into a group called "My Contacts" and to throw all the others into a superset of this called "All Contacts". This is an unhelpful organization, and one that I believe replaced a superior model Google had previously employed.
In the old model, rather than have a superset of My Contacts which added in the fragmentary or rich hints of other people who might be good candidates for promotion to the fold of people I consider my true contacts, Google kept these aspiring contacts in a disjoint set called "Suggested contacts" (or similar). This offered me an easier means of managing those who were "My Contacts" and those who were not, as I could visit the set of Suggested Contacts and tag and move over any who seemed to want to come over to the rarified pantheon of power.
In the new model, there is no way I can review in one place the people and addresses Google has sensed might be important to me -- if I am seeing this information, it is in "All Contacts" and they are heterogeneously mixed in with the people who are already "My Contacts".
Why is this important? Well, other than having a chat bar of people I find relevant to my day, I am particularly dogged by having a manageable contact list for use in voice dialing on my Android phone. This is not only important for my own purposes, but for the purposes of everyone who uses my Android app, as it offers voice dialing and other services where users must speak the names of one of their contacts, and Google is not making it easy for users to manage who is a contact and who is not. This is crucial for me, as the speech recognizer is limited in how many names it can store, and the utility of the app plunges when the precious name space is clogged with transient losers who are difficult to keep from naturally trying to swim into the contact list.
Impact on Developers
It is also next to impossible for me to determine this myself in my Java code, but that is to be a subject of a second chapter touching on Android's lack of an object-oriented Java API for accessing contact data. The upshot of this deficiency is a vastly increased need for every third party code to write the same arduous URI-based code on sands that shift with each revision of the Android platform. It creates instability, versioning nightmares and exploding test case scenarios no small third-party developer will ever actually be able to identify, enumerate, let alone support properly.
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