Web Worker Daily

The folks over at Google have announced a new Contacts Data API, which provides programmatic access (via RESTful calls) to a user’s contact information at Google. The API allows applications to retrieve, update, or delete contacts, and if an application is registered with Google it can do this without ever having your username or password (via the AuthSub API).

This is good news for applications that want to let you import your Google contacts and the users who use them. What’s missing? OpenID and OAuth support, as well as stronger contact-management features within Google itself. Still, this is a good step in the direction of data portability.