BatchBook vs. the (data) Blob
- Posted May 15th, 2009
- Filed under: Product Updates
We’ve been in beta with our sync offering for a couple months and I wanted to give you all an update as to where we are at.
Shoeboxed and Freshbooks have been working very well and it’s been great to see all the positive feedback. We’re still looking for ways to make them even better, so if you have any feedback or ideas please let us know.
The one that has not gone as planned has been Google Contacts sync. It’s the only one of of current offerings that does provide two-way sync and that has proven to be trickier than we at first thought. The good news we have ironed out most of the issues but one remains, which we (not so) affectionately call “the Blob”.
At BatchBlue, keeping your data organized is obviously very important to us. We strive to keep all your data in such a way that is easily searched and also logically organized for use with lists and reports.
Therein lies the problem. Google Contacts does not force one to be strict about how they enter addresses data. Data is entered free form (a.k.a. the Blob), which is handy in some cases but for data junkies like us is problematic. We like to keep every part of an addresses saved on its own so you can then search contacts by state, country, zip/postal code etc. It really makes address information much more powerful if you can search on its parts.
Since people can enter free form data into Google, we’re having to work on our own address parser to parse these addresses for entry into BatchBook. Seems easy enough, but just think about all the ways one can enter an address. Plus, every country in the world seems to have different address formats. Once you delve into it, it’s actually a very complex issue and one that may not ever be solved 100%. But we’re now at a point where we’re close to having a workable solution that we can keep building on.
Look for Google Contacts sync to really improve over the next couple weeks. We are bummed it is taking us longer than planned because we know people are anxious for it to be up running. However, the time we’re taking in getting it right will mean a more solid offering once we’re out of beta.
More updates as we have ‘em. And thanks to all for your patience and feedback along the way.
Thanks for the update Sean!
I would be more than happy if it worked from BB to Google and not the other way round. BB is where I keep my data, I just like to see in gmail.
I’m with Stewart; the BB to Google sync is the key for me.
I had problems with Google’s Sync to BlackBerry a few months back, and it appears that for address fields they use a 6-line format.
When they released an early version of Google Sync for BlackBerry something didn’t understand this and you could end up with many copies of an address (and associated phone numbers) in your Google Contacts. Now if you’re cleaning up one of those messes the very last address entry of each type will have 6 lines (even if blank) for the address body.
I’d imagine that another issue is that Google lets you have as many “work” “home” “mobile” numbers as you want with no naming differentiation, while BatchBook requires that the names be different (e.g. Work, Work2, Work3). I could see this causing problems if you get the same values in different orders from Google, so you might end up needing to do some sorting to be sure nothing’s being overwritten.