Portable Contacts lets you get friends’ info on other sites

March 26, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

MySpace, Plaxo and now Google all support a new open standard for sharing social data across web services. Called Portable Contacts, it lets third parties securely access data like your address book in Gmail or your friends list for use on other sites. What are the implications? Third-party sites are getting more data that they can use in other products. For example, a web site might use Portable Contacts to pull information out of a social network, like all of your friends’ birthdays, then let you email virtual greeting cards to these people on their birthdays.

That’s just one of many uses, says Plaxo chief platform architect Joseph Smarr, who led the standard’s development. Other uses could be simple interface tweaks, like an auto-complete form within a web site where users can see the names of their friends appear when they start typing the first letters of their names. “Once data is malleable, people will do more innovative things,” Smarr says.

Microsoft and Yahoo have also been working with Smarr and other developers to build their own contact application programming interfaces — at some point, expect those companies to officially join Portable Contacts.

Up until now, developers have had to “scrape” contact information about a user’s friends from a given service by asking the user for their name and password. That’s not just a risk for users, it’s a time-sink for developers as they have to build software to scrape each individual service — Gmail, Hotmail, etc.

Portable Contacts instead works together with other standards in the so-called open stack. For example, one of those services, called OAuth, lets a site request pieces of information about a user — now, developers can access a site using OAuth then extract specific friend data using Portable Contacts.

Next Story: Obama administration to tighten regulation on VCs?
Previous Story: Nordic Windpower whips up funds for unique turbine

Bookmark and Share

Tags: ,

Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Quick typographic change... it's "OAuth", not "Oauth".
  • Thanks, Chris, fixed.
  • TedHoward
    Maybe now Google can get LinkedIn to stop having its users tell LinkedIn what their Gmail username and password are and then scraping. It sets an incredibly bad precedent for LinkedIn to have to do something so insecure.
  • OAuth + Portable Contacts + Open Social Graphs = The next big thing in Social Networking, closed networks better get it before it's too late. Add in a bit of mobile location data and things start to get exciting.
  • JanRain's RPX solution uses the portable contacts structure as a key piece of it's simple third party authentication enablement product. Portable contacts allows data from such identity providers as facebook, microsoft, google, yahoo to all be normalized into a common format for the web developer. JanRain has found the portable contacts definition to cover nearly all the available profile data today and is looking at also making the Gmail Portable Contacts available in RPX.