Having lots of Gmail, Facebook Twitter, and LinkedIn Contacts on your iPad and iPhone is great, but how do you get them all into your Contacts app where you need them?

I get to use most of the newest devices and test out all the platforms in my job. My "go-to"  phone is the iPhone 4S, but there are features I see on other devices that I really wish were present in iOS. At the top of the list of wants is rich contact integration with my social networks.

WebOS had perhaps the most elegant approach with Synergy.   If you have a contact on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail –- whatever -– just log in and you get a unified contact card with all that information. Doesn’t sound so hard, right?

Now, Android does this pretty well, Windows Phone does a great job with the People hub and QNX –- the OS on the BlackBerry Playbook (and the upcoming BlackBerry 10) -- does an amazing job at this contact integration.

So, why is it so hard for iOS to get this one important feature right? Well, we will have to let the boys and girls in Cupertino figure that one out. For now, there is a way to get all this information into the Contacts app... it just takes a little extra work.

Getting your basic information into Contacts

In the old days, you needed to connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC and then sync your contacts from your Outlook, Google or native contacts app on the computer. It was messy and often inaccurate. Now, fortunately, the majority of our contacts get “sucked into” the iPhone through some sort of cloud syncing.

How to get your iCloud Contacts onto your iPhone or iPad

If you don’t yet have your iCloud contacts on your iPhone, just go to your Settings app and then touch the iCloud tab. Just turn the Contacts switch to the ON position and all your iCloud contacts will be in sync with your iPhone, Mac, iPad, etc.

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How to get your Google Contacts onto your iPhone or iPad

If you use the standard Gmail setup (IMAP instead of Exchange, see below), getting your Google Contacts onto your iPhone or iPad isn't as easy as it should be.  When you typically sign into a Google account you can choose to sync your email, calendar and notes – but not your Google contacts. The easiest way to do this is either:

1. Export your Google contacts from the Google Contacts web app on your computer.
2. Import then contacts to your iCloud account.

1. Log into your Gmail account.
2. Choose Contacts.
3. Under the More tab, choose Export.
4. Choose which format to export all your contacts and where to save the file.

Export your Google contacts into a format that you can import into another app like iCloud

To import these contacts to your iCloud account for syncing:

1. Log into your iCloud account via iCloud.com and click on Contacts.
2. Click on the Settings gear and then choose Import vCard
3. Navigate to where the exported contact file is located and import it into iCloud.

If that is either confusing or a pain in the rear, the other option is to set up your Google account as an Exchange account which will wirelessly sync all your Google account data –- Contacts, Calendars, Notes, etc with your iphone.

1. Go to your Settings app.
2. Tap the Mail, Contacts, Calendars tab.
3. Under the listing of your accounts, touch the Add Account tab.
4. Choose Microsoft Exchange from the list of options
5. Put your Email address in the Email field (youremail@gmail.com)
6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Your Username should be your Email address.
8. Input your password.
9. Add a Description such as “Primary Gmail” or something like that.
10. Touch the Next button at the top right hand corner.
11. On the next screen, in the Server box, type: m.google.com
12. Choose Next.
13. On the following screen, simply turn ON or OFF the things you want to sync with your Google account. For our purposes, make sure that the Contacts tab is in the ON position.
14. Select Save and your Google contacts will now sync with your iPhone contacts.

How to get your Facebook Contacts onto your iPhone and iPad

Most of us have our contacts spread out over our various apps –- especially our social networking apps. I have lots of data for some folks in my Google account, but they are not Facebook friends. The reverse is often true as well. There is a way to get your Facebook contacts into your iPhone – you just have to dig a little to find it.

First off, make sure you have the latest version of the Facebook app downloaded from the App Store.

1. Start up your Facebook app and login into your account.
2. Tap the top left hand corner to get into your Facebook options and touch on Friends.
3. Tap the Action button (the one that looks like a Send key) in the top right hand corner.
4. Choose Sync Contacts from the list.
5. Turn the switch next to Syncing to the ON position – this will had (add?) your Contacts, profile pictures and links to your Contacts app.
6. Read the scary message from Facebook saying that all contacts from your device will be sent and stored by Facebook as subject to their privacy policy.
7. If you are comfortable with that, choose Sync Contacts in the lower right hand corner and your Facebook contacts will be integrated into your iPhone Contacts app.
8. If you want to replace the existing photos of your contacts with their Facebook pictures, turn the Replace photos switch to the ON position.
9. You should now see new category in the Contact information for Facebook contacts that says: Facebook and has a link to his/her Facebook page.

NOTE: This is not perfect, after doing this several times I still have some Facebook contacts whose Facebook page is not listed in their iPhone Contact card.

When it does work, just tap the Facebook address and you can launch their Facebook page right from the Contacts app.

How to get your Twitter Contacts onto your iPhone or iPad

For many of us, we follow people on Twitter who are not our “friends.” For others, we would like to have the Twitter information for our Contacts in case we do want to follow or Direct Message them. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do.

1. First off, download the official Twitter app from the App Store.
2. Go to your Settings app and look for the Twitter settings.
3. Touch the Twitter tab in settings.
4. Touch the Update Contacts button to get Twitter information for your contacts put into their Contact cards.

NOTE: As with Facebook, there are some privacy concerns here. Twitter essentially takes all the email addresses and phone numbers stored in your Contacts app and cross references them against their database to get you the Twitter contact information.

How to get your LinkedIn Contacts onto your iPhone or iPad

LinkedIn may be where most of your professional contacts are stored. For many of us, this is yet another completely different list of contacts than those stored in Gmail or Facebook.  Fortunately, it is easy to get your LinkedIn data into the iPhone.

1. Download the official LinkedIn app from the App Store.
2. Start up the app and login into your LinkedIn account.
3. Touch the You icon – usually at the top right of the four icons.
4. Touch the gear in the upper right hand corner which is the Settings area for LinkedIn.
5. Touch the Download Connections tab and make sure that Download Connections is turned ON.
6. Touch the Download Now button to bring in all your LinkedIn connections into your iPhone.

NOTE: I experienced some interesting things when I did this; some of my contacts, which had their Facebook page link in the web page section of the Contact card, now had the LinkedIn page instead of the Facebook page.  The Contact photo changed according to which app I used last to sync contacts. In some cases, I really wanted the Facebook photo and not the LinkedIn one, so I had to go back and sync the photos from Facebook to replace the LinkedIn ones.

If at this point you are saying to yourself “this is way too complicated” you may be right, but it is the best way to get all this data into one place – Your Contacts app.

How to deal with multiple contact entries

iOS has the ability to link Contacts, so if you had more than one Contact for the same person, you could combine them into a unify view. However, it doesn't seem to work anymore (or was removed). Hopefully this get restored or fixed in iOS 6. Until then, you will need to go to your computer and go to the web site or app and merge the contacts that then sync with your phone.

Merging your Google contacts

If you sync your contacts via Google, the process of merging contacts is not too complicated.

1. Login in to your Gmail account
2. Across the bar at the top, click on More and then on Contacts
3. Once in Contracts, click on More and then scroll down to Find & merge duplicates.
4. Google will then go through your contacts and merge those that have the same name.
5. It is always a good idea to go and check to make sure it was done correctly – but overall this is pretty easy and seamless and will clean up your multiple entries for the same contact.

Merging your Mac address book

For Mac users, Finding and merging your duplicates in Address Book (Contacts under Mountain Lion) is quite easy.

1. Open up your Mac Address Book app.
2. At the very top, click on the Card menu and then scroll down to Look for duplicates and click.
3. You should then receive a message saying that “X number of duplicates were found.”
4. Click on Merge and the cards will be combined so you only have one contact card per individual in your Address Book.

NOTE: If you currently manage your contacts through the iCloud website, there is no way to merge your duplicate contacts from the Contacts app on iCloud.

Conclusion

So, after all this, you should have all your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn contacts along side your Google or whatever other contacts you have on your iPhone. You can launch the Facebook page of your contacts; go to their Twitter page or LinkedIn page right from their Contact card.

This is not a perfect solution as we said at the outset. We wish that you could send a Facebook message or a Direct Message like you can from other platform Contact apps. We wish you could see status updates in the Contact app like the BlackBerry Playbook. Hopefully, these things will be on the horizon for us iOS users.

Do you have other thoughts about the Contacts app on iOS? Have you found other solutions for merging your data? Let us know in the forums.

Google Sync, the nifty ActiveSync-powered service that lets iPhone and iPod touch users get instant, "push" access to their Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar seems to be suffering a bit lately. According to Google:

As many of you have noticed, Google Sync is having some difficulties due to an extended problem with one of our datacenters. This has been going on over the weekend, but it’s got significantly worse today, so I’m just letting everyone know what’s happening.

None of your information has been lost, and you will still be able to get your data through Sync, but you will find that Push isn’t working very well. This is because we’re batching up fetch requests to be able to cope with the traffic we’re seeing while this problem is ongoing. As soon as we’ve got the problem fixed, push should seamlessly start working properly again.

We’re working flat out to get this fixed, but unfortunately we don’t have an ETA at the moment. We’re doing everything we can to improve the situation in the meantime, and I’ll post here again when I have more news.

Finally, I want to apologise to everyone – we’re feeling your pain too, and we will get this sorted out as soon as we can.

If you're having problems with your Google Sync, let us know!

[DailyMobile.se via WMExperts]

Here's a welcome surprise for you: Google has now created Google Sync for iPhone so that you can sync up your Google Contacts and Google Calendar. They are doing it by making their data look like an Exchange server -- meaning that if you're not already using Exchange on your iPhone for work, you can point it at Google's servers (see full instructions here) to get your contacts and calendars pushed out to you. Nice? Nice.

Of course, if you're already using Exchange for work but still want to get your Google data on your iPhone, you'd going to need to get a solution to sync your Google data down to your desktop and then get it from your desktop to your iPhone either via USB tether or via MobileMe. You can learn more about how the two work together in Rene's excellent article on that very subject.

Now, Google, just get Gmail to look like Exchange and we'll be happy campers. Actually, you know what, just fix IMAP, that'll be enough.

Quick Update: As I just noted over at WMExperts, Google licensed Exchange Active Sync (EAS) from Microsoft, which is a shot at RIM but also, maybe, a shot at Apple. Rene just pointed out to me that given all of Google's recent moves with the CalDAV/iCal system, they might have kept on pushing to make the stuff that Mac uses the industry standard. Instead, Google and Microsoft are suddenly working together on using EAS.