What happens to Google contacts in the People app in Windows 8

Question

In the People tile in Windows 8, you can connect to your different accounts, e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Google contacts.

I have a lot of contact information in Google Contacts that I have carefully curated. I also have Facebook and LinkedIn contacts.

I have already connected Facebook and LinkedIn contacts to the People app, and it seems to work ok.

If I connect my Google Contacts to the People app too, what exactly will happen to the Google contacts?

Will my Google contacts be modified in any way by the People app? Merged? Synced? (I understand that they will look merged in the People app, but I am wondering what will happen to the actual Google contacts, which I often use outside the People app)

For instance:

1. If a contact is in Facebook but is missing from Google Contacts, will it be created in Google contacts?
2. If there is a picture for a person in both Facebook and Google Contacts, will the Google Contacts picture be overwritten?
3. If I add a field, such as "Comments" to a contact in the People app, will that comment be written to the comment field for that contact in Google Contacts?

Answer 1

What better way than trying it out. I was sure of what I've to say, but I did try out scenarios you mentioned. Details below:

The People App in Windows 8 does list Contacts from all of your accounts and shows information combined from Google, Facebook and other connected accounts.

However information from sources remain independent. They are not updated or modified without your explicit consent.

Coming directly to your questions,

1) Your Facebook contacts and Google contacts will remain independent and will not show up in other services. I recently installed Windows 8 Pro and connected Facebook, Google, Outlook and few other accounts. My Google contacts page continues to show only my previous GMail contacts and Facebook contacts are not listed.

2) Your Google contacts will remain as they are. No details (including the photo) would be changed just because you connected your Facebook account to the People App on Windows 8.

3) For editing any contact, you need to explicitly specify to which account the changes must take effect:

Of-course you would not be able to edit the contact's Facebook info, but you can choose between your GMail and Outlook accounts.

I edited the Work address and Company information for a contact (after choosing GMail). The information immediately showed up in my Google Contacts (accessed thru Web).

So its absolutely safe to connect all of your accounts in Windows 8. It would enhance the experience and at the same time, cause no trouble!

Answer 2

Some contact information gets deleted after the merge. When I added my google contacts into the People App, most pieces of information did not appear. I have phone number of my contacts in Gmail stored in 'custom' categories (not 'Mobile', 'Home' etc). When I merged the contacts all this information was disappearing bit after bit as I merged each contact.

I've spend my whole day with this mess and I am starting to get a bit annoyed. I still don't have my friends' phone numbers in my phone. This is just not right.

A bit more info, also tried through outlook sync, no luck. Tried export to .csv then import into live.com, also no luck. Tried everything, doing my best to not start rageposting against Win8 :(