Better family connections in Google Contacts

Google Contacts has steadily improved over time and it lets users add family ties – spouse, mother, child, etc. – for quite some time now. Recently, I noticed some small improvements in this area that make it easier to use these connections. For any relationship added to a contact you now get a small link - ‘Find’ - when hovering over the name of the person. Clicking it will open the address book entry if this relationship is also one of your contacts, otherwise you will see a list of matching search results from the address book. It makes it much easier to navigate through related people without first going to the contact search box.

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  Navigate through relationships with the ‘Find’-link
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  Add custom labels for dates

Another update took place in the dates section: instead of being restricted to birthdays and anniversaries, you can now choose ‘Custom’ and type in a label yourself, like ‘Wedding day’ or the name of the children for couples. Or simply delete the default ‘Birthday’-text and replace it with something else. Unfortunately, these custom dates are not displayed in Google Calendar under ‘Contacts’ birthdays’, which is a big caveat if you rely on it to remind you of these extra anniversaries. I can’t image it’s that hard to adjust the code behind this feature to include custom labels, so hopefully we will see them in Calendar soon.

Of course, there is still enough room for improvements in Google’s address book – and while we are talking about couples, it would be nice if they shared some fields: home address and phone, child names and birthdays come to mind. This way updating something for one person would be automatically synced to the spouse – less typing for users, less chance for errors, hence easier to keep the data in your address book fresh.