Adium - Sync aliases between Macs

[occamsrazor]

Hi,

I'm using Adium and have spent a lot of time correcting the displayed contact names from the email address to what I want them to show as - e.g. changing john.smith@aol.com to "John Smith".
Am using Adium on 3 Macs and have a LOT of contacts, and the problem I have is I can't find a way to have the aliases sync, it seems I have to change the aliases on each machine manually.
Anyone know a way to keep the aliases synced between multiple machines? There are aol, msn, and yahoo contacts involved.

Thanks.

 

[occamsrazor]

Bump... no ideas anyone?

I tried to use a symlink to have Adium save the whole profile to my Dropbox, which I was hoping I could sync between machines, but it didn't work... had permissions problems and wasn't able to read/write all the files.

 

[Middling]

You could try putting all your IM contacts in your Address Book (add a nickname if you want Adium to display something other than their name) and then set up Adium to take contact names from Address Book.

In Snow Leopard, Address Book can sync between MobileMe, Yahoo!, Google, Exchange 2007, LDAP, and the new CardDAV standard. I don't remember what Leopard and earlier supported.

 

[occamsrazor]

Thanks for the suggestion.... but I have well over 200 IM contacts, and already sync my address book containing 1500 contacts with my phone. Most of the people in Adium I don't need on phone, and neither do I want the Address Book contacts on Adium.
I'm sure you could get close to a solution using Address Book groups, using the setting "only sync contacts with a phone number", etc.... but it's not a particularly elegant solution.
I thought syncing profile via Dropbox would be the best solution, but Adium seems to have permissions problems storing it's profile files elsewhere.
What I don't understand, is why the IM networks don't (or at least it isn't working in Adium's case) allow your display names to be synced with their servers, that would be by far the simplest solution.