Flat out: Google’s contact management system is awful. I’ve never really liked the fact that Google automatically added users to my contact list when I emailed them, but some fundamental flaws with such a system are now being exposed by Google’s social movement.

Google Operating System has a great post outlining exactly how Google determines who to add as contact in your Gmail address book. This is becoming increasingly important because some of Google’s newer social features such as the recent Google Reader ‘Friends’ draw directly from this list – and at least for me it’s been a major issue.

Here are the 2 rules that get someone added to your contact list (and the potential errors pointed out by Google Operating System):

Rule #1:
if you reply to someone’s email, that person is added to your Gmail contact list.
(Error #1: you may not know that person)

Rule #2 (opt-out):
if you reply to someone’s messages more than 2-3 times, that person is added to the list of Google Talk friends.
(Error #2: see error #1. Also that person may not be your friend.)

While these rules may make your life a lot simpler in a very small email ecosystem, if you use your Gmail account to talk to many people, a lot of whom aren’t actually friends at all but business contacts and worse, possibly enemies, this system is a disaster.

I would be fine if Google simply let you turn this system off, but the problem is that at least with Google Reader ‘Friends’ there is no other way to add friends! Google has such an opportunity with Google Reader’s social features and they are blowing it because of this convoluted friending/contact functionality.

It’s real simple Google: just let us manually enter who we want to include in these programs. Either that or take a look at Facebook’s new ‘Friend Lists’ feature and do exactly that with Google contacts – allow users to define which who can see their Shared Google Reader items, who can see their Shared Google Maps, etc…

Robert Scoble has some other ideas for improvements to this system.

I’m glad to see Google is going forward with a social strategy, but it’d be nice if they made it so the ’social’ part of it actually makes sense.