Membranophonist’s Ramblings

The Address Book has contact groups, but they are not universal; groups in the Address Book are not available as groups to iChat AV. Yes, you can pick from existing AB groups, but you cannot pick the groups themselves. Constructing what could be identical groups twice in different applications doesn’t make much sense to me. Apple leveraged the value of existing groups with the iPhoto albums in the Desktop picture preference pane, so it is not a concept that they are unaware of. Subconsciously, this may be what brought this idea to my mind.

In addition to system-wide groups, the ability to combine several address book groups into one chat group would allow you to set up divisions between business and personal contacts. For instance, you might have AB groups for your ski club, relatives, and fellow week-end musicians. These could all be lumped into a larger “personal” chat buddy group while your business contacts (organized by company or industry) would form the “work” group. Ideally, you could then easily set your status to indicate that you are available to your work, but not personal contacts (or the inverse).

Perhaps one day, you could automatically generate groups based on the relationships entered in their vCards; family relationships and last names (and maiden names) could be analyzed to automatically group families. This could work for companies as well, as seen in the new OmniGraffle tools for organizational charts.