Both Google Now and Siri now support the use of nicknames for your contacts, so you can quickly get in touch with “mom,” “dad,” “the boss,” or “maverick” more easily than ever. Here’s how to ditch those long-winded real names and get your nicknames set up instead on Android and iOS.

With iOS 8, Apple introduced a row of contact shortcuts at the top of the multitasking screen (tap twice on Home to get to it). If you want to take more control over which faces you see here, or you want to shut off the feature altogether, these are the settings you need to tweak.

Organizing your contacts in Gmail historically atrocious. And now, thanks in part to the demise of Google+, it's about to become way better.

If you've got a well-organized contacts book, our hats are tipped in your direction. Keeping track of hundreds of people across dozens of sites and services is no easy task, and it seems strange that no one's quite cracked the formula for getting all this information sorted out. Here are four apps taking on the…

Android is a fine OS, but the lure of a new iPhone may be too much to resist. If you're going to make the switch, you won't want to leave any scrap of your precious mobile identity in Android's cold robotic embrace. Here's how to pack up everything you'll need to bring to your new life in Apple's walled garden.

What really sucks about losing your phone—besides losing the phone—is that you also lose a whole bunch of your data. But to help ease that pain, a iPhone thief in China copied down a list of all his victim's contacts (by hand!) and returned it to its rightful owner. All 1,000 of them.

For a good portion of the population, remembering both names and faces is a task too astronomical to even conceive of. You meet a fun, new person, and you don't want to be rude—but chances are, as soon as they walk away, you've already forgotten what they look like. The problem only exacerbated when you've downed a…

WhatsApp, the Instant Message client beloved of people too cheap to text, appears to contravene international privacy laws because of the way it forces users to grant it access to their entire address book.

One of the benefits of using Android is the options and flexibility you get. Like Phonedeck, an app that essentially lets you control your phone from a web browser. That's right, you can send texts, make calls and reject calls on your phone all through your computer.

I was always confused at why Apple bothered making a contacts 'app' since it was nothing more than a shortcut for what was already inside the contacts tab in phone app. There was no imagination to it! Buzz Contacts is a contacts app that's actually useful: it's faster, better and looks reaaaally good.

Facebook loves doing unexpected things with your data. Now it's culling numbers from your phone and adding them to its online database to "help you" find contacts. Don't trust Facebook with your mom's number? Here's how to fix it.

Finding friends on Google+ is easy if all your contacts are on Gmail. But what about if they're stored on your Mac, or in Outlook? Or, for some crazy-in-the-coconut reason, you want to rub shoulders with your LinkedIn contacts?

Sticking glass in your eye is objectively a bad idea. And yet, in the 1800s, there were several highly educated individuals repeating that very action.

Even though the iTunes app and the Contacts app are two things the iPhone does fairly well already, Apple's patenting a tile-based view for both. Though, it's just as likely they grab the patent but don't implement this feature. [Patently Apple]

You probably have more friends scattered across more social networks than you can even think of right now. Friends wants to be the place where you can find them all—and see what they're saying, wherever they're saying it.

Cyberstalking: it's exhausting! First you've gotta check Facebook statuses, then move over to Twitter updates, maybe give a quick call for a nice heavy breathing moment. Thank goodness this Friends app collects all that info in one place. Time: saved.

Google allows its users to download their data for exporting elsewhere. But after their tough stance against Facebook not sharing its own data, they blocked that option. Facebook's cleverly circumnavigated the block, meaning Gmail users can still find friends there.

After Google hired the Facebook app developer (it was "frustrating" claims Zuckerberg), their relationship has now soured even more, as Google's changed their terms of service so Gmail users can't import their contacts to Facebook—because Facebook doesn't reciprocate.

Another week, another change to web-based Gmail. This time the contacts section has received a lick of paint, with keyboard shortcuts, organization by surnames and custom labels being just a few of the improvements. Check it out from today. [GmailBlog]