I find it hard to believe…so much so that I ask everyone to open my eyes: what am I missing here? Gmail’s Contact Manager (the new one) allows you to capture the typical data like email, phone, address, photo ( a great plus!), IM, but there’s no field to capture homepage addresses! (???).
You can add as many fields as you like, but only of the pre-defined types, and if you use the Notes field to enter websites, they don’t become clickable URLs.
Of all companies on Earth, Google is the last one I would expect to NOT care about capturing web information…
Update: Charlie “Spanning” Wood adds:
…worse yet, it uses one big blob for mailing address instead of having fields for address, city, state/region, postal code, etc.
And we wonder why it’s difficult to sync Gmail contact data…
Voyagerfan5761 adds that the ability to add custom fields, a handy feature supported in the earlier Gmail version is gone now, too.
Add to this the idiotic restriction that now you can only delete 20 contacts at a time, and one can really wonder if the new Contact Manager in Gmail is a step back in functionality – albeit with nicer boxes. 
(Oh, you wonder why you’d want to delete contacts? Because Gmail adds anyone you respond to as a contact, without the ability to change that default).
Yeah, that’s not good. But worse yet, it uses one big blob for mailing address instead of having fields for aaddress, city, state/region, postal code, etc. I’m optimistic they’re working on that as we speak.
-c
No wonder Plaxo and others (there’s this Spanning Thingie around?) are having a hard time synchronizing this data mess…
Call it vanity, but could you put the ‘1’ into my name above? Thanks. 🙂 (You’re welcome to delete this comment once it’s been acted on.)
Ouch, sorry… fixed.
Definitely a step (or two or three) backwards. And am I right that it’s no longer possible to create a group just by typing in a bunch of addresses? Or am I missing something as well? (What I mean is that previously you could just start typing in a bunch of addresses and it would create a group whereas now you have to add contacts one-by-one.)
Yes, I haven’t played with this before, but you’re right, you have to select them first, than add. It might be a bit of hassle to create a group of 10 from a contact list of 1000+ 🙁
Any word from Google on addressing theses issues? I’m ready to leave GMAIL due to the poor contact management. It seems to have a really immature data model.
Gmail has disappointed me time and time again and I have since stopped using it for this and other reasons. I’m now using http://www.octopuscity.com for contact management stuff… it’s free, you can sync contacts in very easily from webmail and Outlook or Excel, it has a ton of space, and it’s also a business networking community. so really other than for email there’s nothing contact-mangement-wise i use any of my email addresses for anymore.
I TOTALLY agree. The lack of flexibility is terrible. The only 2 things I like is the weblink to a map (which is a no-brainer), and the specification of an IM client (though not sure what that is good for, since google chat is only works with gmail addresses).
Please return to the old – faster and trusted.