Fill out your Google+ Info. It's actually helpful

Chip Oglesby bio photo By Chip Oglesby

One easter egg of sorts that I’ve found on Google+ is what happens with your contact information.

In your Google+ profile you can list your contact information (pictured below). As you can see you can enter your phone number, email, fax, pager (who still uses these?), chat and address

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Also of note is the fact that you can choose who you want to share this information with. By default I have chosen to share my phone number and email address with my circles and not the public. When I add someone to my circles, they will have that information to me.

The VCF killer

Don’t you hate when someone has a new email address or phone number and you don’t know or have forgotten which one to call or use? Me too. This is where the genius of your Google+ contact information comes into play.

When you look at your Contacts Manager in Gmail, you’ll see a section called “Circles.” Everyone who you’ve circled will now be neatly organized and if they’ve chosen to share their contact information with you, bam, there it is!

As you can see from the screenshot below, Google will mix your contact information with theirs if you already have them in your contacts.

Now as long as the user keeps their information up to date and shares it with their circles you’ll always have the most up-to-date info.

Other notes

One thing I would ask Google to change is the ability to share these fields individually with circles instead of sharing them as a whole. There are some family members I would like to share my current address with and not share it with everyone else. If anyone at Google reads this, maybe you can get on that?

Update/Temporary solution: One hack that I’ve noticed is having both a ‘personal’ and a ‘work’ field. For this, you might want to include a phone number and address. This way you can share it with your family and friends and no one else. For the work field, you might want to include your cell phone, work number and email and share that with your other circles.** **