Portable Contacts

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= project to create open specifications to share address book data

URL = http://portablecontacts.net/


Description

"The momentum began building for 'data portability' last year, and we are now at a point where there is strong support for the principle that users should be in control of their data and have the freedom to access it from across the web. And the major players have all recognized that they and their users are better off with secure contacts APIs (rather than having third-party services ask for users' credentials in order to scrape their data). As a result, we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from. Just as OAuth has provided a standard to unify the various proprietary schemes for delegated authorization, we believe we can do the same thing for securely sharing address book and friends list data."