My contacts are a mess. Phone numbers scattered across Google Contacts, iCloud, some just stored on my phone. And don't get me started on email addresses. I generally just rely on Gmail to autocomplete the email addresses that I've used before...<p>Show me nirvana, hacker news.
I started working as a Developer Evangelist about a year and a half ago, and was having a pretty nasty problem dealing with contacts myself. I keep meeting people all the time, and want some way to:<p>* Have their contact info auto-imported if I add them as a friend in SOME WAY: either by emailing them, tweeting them, messaging them, whatever.<p>* Have all my contacts synced into one centralized data store (Google Contacts, in my case).<p>* Merge and remove duplicate contacts so I don't have to deal with 50 entries of people...<p>What I ended up settling on is really working well for the past year or so.<p>I use Google contacts as my primary datastore. I then use FullContact (free): <a href="https://www.fullcontact.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fullcontact.com/</a><p>FullContact will hook into everything, eg: Google / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn / etc., grab EVERYONE'S contact info, and merge it into one record, then merge that back into Google contacts =)<p>Would highly recommend it.
Get everything in Google Contacts and use the webapp (<a href="https://contacts.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://contacts.google.com/</a>) to merge contacts. It has the ability to suggest merges and it's easy to do the leftover ones manually.
<a href="https://contacts.google.com/u/0/preview/all" rel="nofollow">https://contacts.google.com/u/0/preview/all</a> the new google contacts can help you in categorising contacts finding duplicates and delteing them aswell
I tend to combine personal & business contacts together.<p>Recently came across the Free Hubpsot CRM, while I've yet to give to get it a test drive, the demo looks interesting > <a href="http://www.hubspot.com/crm" rel="nofollow">http://www.hubspot.com/crm</a>
Given that I keep a very close group of friends, the default iOS Contacts app w/ iCloud works.<p>For those with large groups of people/information, go with Google Contacts.