I'm experiencing a problem related to Google Contacts, or what I consider to be "Phantom" Google Contacts. I use GMail for email, but Trillian for chat to connect to my Google Talk account. In my GMail contact list I've got about 40 contacts and 60 contacts in some circles I've created. My problem is that when I sign into Google Talk using Trillian it shows that I have over 430 contacts ... virtually all of which are offline. I don't know any of these people, nor have I ever coresponded with them directly ... but Google (and as a result, Trillian) believes we're contacts and may want to chat.
Since these names don't show up in my GMail contacts list, I can't remove them on the web. I've tried removing them from Trillian and they do disappear (I've also tried uninstalling and re-installing the app) but they always come back.
My best guess of where these names may have come from is a Google+ Circle created for Hacker News users I once added myself to located here:
https://plus.google.com/106419647632534512037/
I've since unsubscribed from following that circle, however I suspect that despite unsubscribing from the circle, it's still affecting my contacts, and it's being pushed through to my chat client. This is just a guess since that's the only thing I can think of where my contact list may have been corrupted.
I'd like to find a way to permanently purge these phantom contacts, but don't know how or where to do this.