The gnome developers are hard at work making the first linux desktop, that do not look like a cheap windows/mac rip off, even better. There are stupid mistakes they made along the way, but still Gnome 3.0 gives the best experience free software can offer by default. Obviously there are more feature need to be included to make it a complete replacement for your good old Gnome 2.x. For the time being you can use these extensions to get some functionalities back.
Anyway, Gnome developers continue its work to have a consistent behaviour across the entire desktop. With its next incarnation, the team also escalates this behaviour towards individual applications. Meet Gnome contacts, the contacts application that you will see in the 3.2 version of your awesome desktop.
The application have a two window appearance. Left side for the list of contacts and the right side for the details of a particular contact.
The contacts will auto populate from the cloud services like your gmail through the web accounts (another feature planned for the 3.2). The contacts will be available to use on all the applications across the desktop.
The image shows how the contacts could be visible while composing a message in your evolution mail.
Justin Stories 
All I want for that is ldap integration – read and write.
Yes, agreed! LDAP support is a must.
If you have evolution setup to sync contacts with Exchange Server, will GNOME contacts also sync with Exchange Server? That would just rock..
FINALLY! I’ve wanted this feature for over 3 years now! I have missed this from my windows days using yahoo widgets.
I just need some actual upgrades from G2 > Gnome Shell now and my life will be complete once more.
Will GNOME Contacts sync with GMail contacts?
OK, I feel humbled by my ignorance (not reading the full post mentioning gmail sync explicitely). 🙂
Will gnome team do same hard work on Evolution? Or Evolution will be someone from many good applications where development is dead.
I like Evolution, there is good contact management, so I do not understand now, why Gnome-contacts, when better contact management is in Evolution….
Why don”t you use Akonadi+Nepomuk already implemented in KDE4? From my point of view it has similar idea of Contacts saved in Nepomuk Contact Ontology (NCO) format in Nepomuk storage. Application use Akonadi to access data from Nepomuk.
There was a time when my contacts were spread far and wide, now they just seem to be converging so nicely. No more retyping 200 phone numbers ever time I switch phones.
will there be an akonadi backend for the gnome PIM stuff? thats my whish. Desktopindipendent sync ! pls make it real 🙂
I hear you about search speed–Microsoft has always relied on Moore’s Law and for some people it works great. I’m glad that you’ve had good luck with it. Also, good point about Live offering a very different grounds for comparison