I just upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04, looking forward to use the new Gnome Contacts, but I had some issues.
At the first start, I was asked what contact source to use. I had three choices: local, Google and Google. Which is weird, since I have configured just one Google account configured in online accounts. At any rate, I chose the first one (blindly, I had no way to tell the two apart) and it seems that I see my Google contacts in the address book.
The problem is that for some of them, I see something like
some data...
Local
some data..
Google
some data...
that is, the data is repeated three times. I am pretty sure my Google address book is clean: I manually removed all cruft and merged all duplications no longer than one month ago.
So, why is that I am seeing these repetitions? Is Gnome contacts using my old Evolution address book? I would like to configure it, but I cannot even find a menu.
You are experiencing an almost universal problem with Google Contacts. It appears that Google stores contacts in a database and duplicates the contact whenever it is changed and marks the old version of the contact so that it is not shown on the website. I have not been able to find any sync software that can successfully differentiate between current valid contacts and previous versions and deleted contacts. It seems that at some point Google gets around to removing the old contacts but it seems to take a very long time something like 90 days.