Google Implements New Open Standard for Friends Lists
Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.
Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.
According to the Portable Contacts website:
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.
Why is This Important?
The social web works best when it's truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That's much better than starting cold.
These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that's good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You've heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That's where we're headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.
That's a pretty big deal and it's fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we'll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.
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This is huge. The *Fastest* way to have an app go viral and hockey stick in traffic is to push out invites to people's friends. Having a standard here is going to really help new sites get off the ground. It will be interesting to see if Facebook reacts to this.
We will most definitely be using this feature in a fair few of our projects... At the moment FB connect is the only option as if I have a choice between it and anything else, we may as well just plump for FB...
Now if FB play this game with Google it would be such a good thing for the web in general, the rest would just fall in...
Interesting times are afoot.
www.twitter.com/redeye
Funny to scroll down to the comment form after reading this good news and see the (proprietary) Facebook Connect button...
I'd like to see a list of apps using that technology when it comes out. It's cool to see the announcement, but later be frustrated on how to implement it for those of us only dangerous enough to know that we suck at programming...
This show's what google always think of the web users.
This is good news. Its great to see the web getting more and more open and standardized .
"More" open and standardized? What ever happened to FOAF? You know, that RDF-based format used by virtually everybody else? Methinks Google is going the Microsoft way here. And that leads to the tar pit.
This is very encouraging to see Google moving Modular Innovation forward through their leadership in adoption of Portable Contacts -- now, let's see which other services follow suite; since it will be most effective when they all support it. Good read to understand how the adoption of some standards is leading to the acceleration of Modular Innovation for my readers in their Weekend Reading...
http://tpgblog.com/2009/03/27/vc-value-facebook-portable-contacts-google/
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com
This is AWESOME!
Try the best homepage
@ruby
RWW also supports openid, as you can see here.
Posted by: http://openid.aol.com/atomic1fire
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March 27, 2009 4:08 PM
I wonder why did not clearly deprecate or even remove the direct authentication from the draft spec. I can see new services asking me for user credentials to remote services. We should not support that.
Greetings
Bernd
We will most definitely be using this feature in a fair few of our projects... At the moment FB connect is the only option as if I have a choice between it and anything else, we may as well just plump for FB...
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Its great to see the web getting more and more open and standardized .
This kind of good articles needs regular updates on subsequent development so that it can be useful data / information for use
Is there anything to support the notion that google plans to open-source this? What would be the advantage to Google? Are you saying they would open-source the codec, promise they won’t enforce any patents involved in the codec, and give this to the HTML5 WG? (this would seem to me to not be a viable solution, as the WG was already given an open-source codec which Apple rejected because of “patent concerns”. Possibly a big organization like google behind a codec could help… who knows)