Gmail Contacts size increased to 25000

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/store-up-to-25000-contacts.html

by vijaydev • 15 years ago

18 7 15 years ago

gmailblog.blogspot.com

archgoon• 15 years ago

Can anyone elucidate the trade offs in not having a limit at all and ultimately simply limiting the max number of contacts by the storage that they've already issued to users? Are contacts viewed as separate storage from email?

(25K contacts at 128 kb yields 3 gigs of storage)

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

Do your contacts count against your Gmail storage quota? I'm assuming they do, but curious to know for certain.

jonknee• 15 years ago

The only reason I can think of is it makes the UI/UX of the contacts browser more of a challenge. Currently the contacts are sent over as a JSON object for the auto-complete stuff. It probably also bogs down syncing (my Google contacts are synced with my computer and phone).

I guess it also could be an attempt at minimizing commercial usage (I wasn't spamming, I was just emailing my contacts!).

1337p337• 15 years ago

Google has lots and lots of storage. The TL;DR version: Contacts are more about bandwidth and processing power. Follow my reasoning for a minute if that seems like a leap.

One of Google's features is that it attempts to build a social graph based on your contacts from its various services. Have a look at the Dashboard ( http://google.com/dashboard ), which tells you what Google is willing to tell you about what it knows. You may notice a lot of data that you didn't give Google. Scroll down to the "Social Circle and Content" section. This is the interesting bit: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social . These are the people you email using GMail, the people you speak to on Google Chat, people you interact with on Reader, Latitude, Picasa, etc. No big deal so far, until you get to the "connected accounts" section.

Google will let you connect your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc., accounts to your Google Account. If you don't connect these accounts, though, it will use what it knows about your social graph to try to find your account. I discovered this when I logged into my GMail account and made a stop at the Dashboard, to find that it had guessed my Twitter account, and this despite the fact that I had used a different email address and a name totally unrelated to the one I used for GMail. It did this, apparently, by comparing my social graph to the people I followed on Twitter. Per Google's help page about this ( http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer... ), Google finds this out using "[s]imilarities between your connections. For example, Bob's Google Contacts have names that are very similar to the names of people he follows publicly on Twitter." (You'll need to click "Learn how Google matches an account to you" to get that text to appear on the page.)

Google also does this if you have multiple Google accounts, apparently. Via http://gawker.com/#!5637234 , "with a friend's consent, he pulled up the person's email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account".

So, Google's paying Twitter and Facebook (among others) to scrape accounts, which was big news for both of the social networking sites, especially Twitter, which lacked much solid revenue at the time. Google keeps a social graph for all of these other sites' users, and compares them to the social graphs of its own users and, if the above quote from Gawker is true, also against its own users to see which Google accounts belong to the same person. Facebook alone has 600 million users, quite a few accounts to try to match against each of Google's users, and there are a number of services that Google scrapes. The number of contacts you have (which are shared between GMail and Chat, as well as the partial overlap with contacts in Buzz, Reader, Youtube, and others), 500, 25k, or whatever arbitrary number, take up a negligible amount of storage compared to the amount of processing power and bandwidth required to scrape, build, and compare hundreds of millions (if not billions) of social graphs for accounts across dozens of services.

nbpoole• 15 years ago

There was a previous HN discussion about this limit at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263093. It included some speculation about why Google would limit the number of contacts.

mortenjorck• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure that number exceeds the human capacity to maintain discrete external identities for individuals we know, have met, or know of.

Interestingly, it's about 100x the upper limit for Dunbar's number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

zachc• 15 years ago

Also see Path [1], a social network which takes an opposite approach and limits contacts to 50 people.

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/15/path-social-n...

Gmail Contacts size increased to 25000

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