Show your Google Contacts on a map using Google Fusion Tables

Just for the fun of it, I decided to investigate ways to display my Google contacts on a map.  One solution I use already quite a while is the Contacts on map app on my Android smartphone.  But I also want a desktop solution that doesn't require me to enter my Google credentials on a website.  Finding such a solution turned out to be hard, so in the end, I decided to be creative and construct my own solution.  These are the steps I followed.  Google Fusion Tables to the rescue!

Step 1: export your Google contacts

1. Surf to http://contacts.google.com
2. In the left menu-bar, under More, find Export and go to the old Google Contacts (because the new Google Contacts doesn't allow you to export your contacts yet).
3. In the old Google Contacts, select More followed by Export and export your contacts in Outlook CSV format (the Google CSV format didn't work for me):
   
   
   

Step 2: import your CSV file in Google Fusion tables

1. Surf to http://drive.google.com
2. Check if you have Google Fusion Tables available under New / More.  If you don't have it yet, install the Google Fusion Tables app.
3. Create a new Google Fusion Table using New / More / Google Fusion Tables.
4. Under Import new table use From this computer and select and upload your contacts.csv file.  Use comma as separator character and select UTF-8 character encoding:

Step 3: select the column to use as a location

1. First, you can remove some unnecessary columns using the Select Columns menu item from the Rows 1 tab.
2. Then, pick the column you want to use as your location column (e.g. Home Address), and change its type to Location.
3. Now go to the tab called Map of Home Address and select Home Address as Location column:
   
   
   
4. Press Begin geocoding and once that's finished, you should see a nice map of all your contacts.

Step 4: finetune

To change several map feature styles and the content of the info window that appears when you click on a contact from the map, go to the tab of the map and select Change map.  It is even possible to display your contacts in a heat map.  My map finally looks like this:

Conclusion

If you keep all your contacts centralized in Google contacts, then visualizing for example their home and work address on a map is rather easy using Google Fusion Tables.  I use these kind of maps a lot when I go somewhere and want to say hi to friends that I haven't seen in a while.

Comments and suggestions on this article are more than welcome!