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Help Duplicate Facebook Profile Buttons for Contacts

insertnewsn

Newbie
Oct 21, 2009
16
0
Hello all,

Quick question:

I have all my Google/Facebook accounts sync with my Droid, but I choose not to display all of them at once.

Instead, when I manually add them in as a contact (for example, John Doe), I love that it realizes John has a facebook account and automatically syncs his picture/facebook info.

However, if I click on John Doe's contact, it lists two items for "Facebook profile" (with "View Profile" underneath). This occurs with multiple contacts (some have 3 of these "view profile" links).

Am I doing something wrong? How can I make all extraneous facebook profile links go away?
 
So, I have removed my facebook account (thus removing the facebook instances from my contacts).

I re-added my facebook accounts. Now only having one instance of a contact's facebook profile in the contact page.

After forcing another sync, I see that a second instance is added.

The issue is a bug with facebook syncing with the contacts. My plan is to remove my facebook account, add it, and turn off syncing (after the initial sync). Maybe this will get updated soon.
 
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So, I have removed my facebook account (thus removing the facebook instances from my contacts).

I re-added my facebook accounts. Now only having one instance of a contact's facebook profile in the contact page.

After forcing another sync, I see that a second instance is added.

The issue is a bug with facebook syncing with the contacts. My plan is to remove my facebook account, add it, and turn off syncing (after the initial sync). Maybe this will get updated soon.

I just noticed that I have this problem this morning. I hope that they come out with a fix for this. On mine, some of the facebook profiles have their current status, while the other one just lets you view their profile. Weird!
 
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I love that it realizes John has a facebook account and automatically syncs his picture/facebook info.
I on the other hand do not like that it overrides my photo of "John" with his facebook picture. Is there a way to force the phone to use the photo I've selected for my friends?

I do like having the phone use the facebook profile photo if I don't have one selected.
 
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Yes, u can manually choose the photo for a contact. Go into the contact's edit page and click on their picture..u should be able to change it from there
I was confused since my desired contact's picture was already there when I selected edit. But after clicking on the picture I was able to select "Use this photo." Worked like a charm!

Thank you.
 
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TLDNR: All the sync services fight to set the icon. If you want your specified image to be the icon, you have to unlink all services for that contact.

Long version:
I'll take a stab at this: It seems to be a race condition synchronizing with multiple services. (The phrase "seems to be" is important, since this is entirely my speculation based on observation of the phone's behavior.

Each service that links that service's image with the phone's contact icons (Facebook, Flickr, Google, etc.) will set the contact icon at the time of a sync regardless of other services that also link contact icons (because the services are unaware of each other, more on this later). This means that for a given contact, the icon shown will be the one set by whichever service most recently did a sync. If the Facebook app does a sync, the icon will be the image from FB. If Flickr does a sync two minutes later, the icon will be the image from that user's Flicr account (which means the FB icon was only up for two minutes).

Now here's the rub: What you're expecting to happen is the reverse of what's really going on. You expect that contacts for which you've not specified an icon will have whatever icon whichever service decides to set for it, but if you explicitly set an icon, it would override any service's icon sync (effectively disabling icon sync for that contact). However, when you use a photo to "set as contact icon" on your phone, it doesn't actually set it as the contact icon on your phone, it sets it as the contact icon for the Google sync service. Hence, if Google was the last service to sync your contacts, that's the icon that will show for a contact. As soon as another service does a sync, the contact icon gets overwritten.

The reason for this is because your phone doesn't actually have contacts. Your phone only knows what Google's sync service tells it, and the Google service isn't any more special than the other sync services--the information from all of them just gets aggregated in the display on your phone. In the case of two services having different phone numbers both marked as "Home," you get two phone numbers in that contact marked "Home." In the case of an icon, though, there can be only one, and instead of dealing with this situation elegantly (by, say, providing a way to have the services negotiate, or negotiate conflicts for them by setting a one service to be the boss, or even setting their own service to be the boss), Google decided to not deal with it at all; hence the race condition. *sigh*

If you absolutely want a certain image as a contact's icon, you have to eliminate this race condition by eliminating any competition (you can't have a race with only one competitor). You have to unlink the contact from all the services. (Of course, when you unlink it from everything, you really haven't--you've unlinked it from everything except Google, because you can't really unlink it from Google, because "it" only exists in Google. The fact that there's even an icon to do that is a full-on, pants-on-fire user interface lie.)
 
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