Automerging buddies

[Etan Reisner]

My concern would be that contacts are sufficiently invisible enough that
we still get people occasionally "losing" buddies while reorganizing their
buddy lists (which is an actual interaction with the UI).

I can only imagine that people will be utterly and completely mystified if
they add a new account and see no indication that any of their buddies
were added to the list.

Without indicating the auto-merge somewhere obvious in the UI and/or
making contacts much more obvious (and potentially even then) I'm a bit
concerned about this becoming a "set and forget" option which causes
"breakage" much later down the line.

I'm also concerned about incorrect merges. Using remote buddy set aliases
seems too risky to me and using only "local" aliases may not be useful
enough to make this worthwhile (for services that can't store that
information and/or don't differentiate between local and remote set
aliases).

    -Etan