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Google Contacts API: a Step Towards Portability

March 6th, 2008 (8:27am) Mike Gunderloy 2 Comments

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.

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2 Comments Post your own comment

josh says: March 6th, 2008 9:06am

There is lots of potential for this. I immediately thought of a business idea when I saw this announcement.

Mike Reynolds says: March 6th, 2008 10:55am

A great move in the direction of DataPortability. Adds to the current arsenal of DataPortability tools.

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