contactsicloud
I have an iPhone (iOS 5.1). I added a new telephone number to a new address book entry yesterday and today I find that neither the iCloud Web interface nor my address book on my desktop (OS X 10.7.3) know anything of the new entry.
I was used to automatic syncing via the Internet from MobileMe. Does it not work like that with iCloud?
(Calendar syncing appears to work. Both calendar and address book are switched on on both the iPhone and the iCloud control panel on my desktop.)
When I had Snow Leopard I had the Google address book sync enabled and I somehow managed to put a 'sync' icon in the menu bar.
If I remember correctly I added it from the "old" iSync application (unsuccessfully trying to sync with a Samsung phone).
Now in Lion I still have it and it allows me to manually force the update of my Google address book, but I can't find how to obtain it as the iSync app seems to have disappeared.
This article here describes the situation of iSync in more details
You can set up multiple different iCloud accounts in the "Mail, Contacts, and Calendars" preference panel, and also on your iPhone and iPads.
I have accomplished a shared address book with my partner by each of us having a primary iCloud account (me@us.com, her@us.com) - and then a shared iCould account us@us.com.
One annoying downside is that the Lion Address Book app labels both address books as "iCloud" making it a bit hard to distinguish what contacts are where. We solve this by having different contact lists in each address book, so they are distinct.
It seems with just a little bit of work Apple could make this MUCH better, but this is the best solution I have seen so far.
Best Answer
In your Macintosh Address Book, go to Preferences/Accounts and make sure that iCloud is listed there and enabled.
After doing that go back into Address Book and Click on the red bookmark so you're looking at the front page. It should say "iCloud" at the top of the list of folder/groups you may have there. If it says "On My Mac" then see if you can choose "iCloud."
The design of switching between "on my mac" and "iCloud" is confusing for us "old" mobileme users and my guess is it will change in time.