Google Releases Contacts API
What's the most in-demand API on the web that hasn't existed until today? Wether they knew it or not, millions of people online have thought to themselves "why is this new site I'm on asking me for my Gmail username and password? When will there be a secure API for me to pass those contacts allong without giving up my password?"
That day has come. The Google Contacts API went live tonight and it enables far more than just contact transfer.
According to the Contacts API site, the new API allows application developers to enable their users to:
- Synchronize Google contacts with contacts on a mobile device
- Maintain relationships between people in social applications
- Give users the ability to communicate directly with their friends from external applications using phone, email, and IM
"The Contacts API allows developers to create, read, update, and delete contacts using the Google Data protocol, based on AtomPub," the announcement says. "It also allows for incremental sync by supporting the 'updated-min' and 'showdeleted' parameters."
Pretty hot read/write stuff and particularly interesting given today's developer launch of the location tracking Fire Eagle from Yahoo!
One thing Fire Eagle has going for it that the Google Contacts API does not is support for the open authentication standard oAuth. Support by Google for oAuth in this API would have reduced the work required for developers by allowing code from other authentication proccesses to be reused. Google is supporting oAuth in OpenSocial, but on some days that hairball is harder to get excited about that a nice simple API like this one that delivers clear value.
Today's a big day for developers, may the secure Gmail contact leveraging begin!
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Nice now someone needs to leverage this so I can have full synchronization between Gmail, Outlook and my Windows Mobile phone. I would love to ditch my exchange account and use Gmail to sync between my phone, web and computer.
Posted by: Justin P. | March 6, 2008 5:16 AM
That's great news...
One thing I didn't get, though, is what credentials should be passed to the API in order to fetch the contacts. Currently, the username and password are passed.
If only the username is passed to the API, then this would mean a serious breach to one's personal contacts (and a great day for spammers...)
Posted by: SuTree | March 6, 2008 5:23 AM
Great! We will implement this today ... all these APIs suggest that the meta-applications space is going to be hot in 2008.
Posted by: Raskin | March 6, 2008 5:59 AM
@SuTree
I wondered the same thing when I first heard about it, but it looks like Google has a good setup. When an application wants your contacts, you'll be forwarded to a Google login page on google.com to grant access. The application never gets your login credentials, just an authentication token after you login that lets the application temporarily access your contacts. This is very similar to the way you login to Facebook API applications.
Also, a developer has to register his/her domain with Google before getting access to the API, so Google should be able to filter out rogue developer attempts.
@Marshall
I'm a little mystified why Google is using their AuthSub system instead of oAuth... a bit disappointing that this release, which fits so well with the DataPortability vision, isn't using such a standard.
Posted by: theharmonyguy | March 6, 2008 7:00 AM
Aaaah... perfect timing. I just finished updating all my Gmail contacts today from a few other sources so I could be completely remote when needed. Apparently, I could have done this a bit easier if I had just waited a week or two.
I had this idea today while doing it that it might be kind of interesting/cool/geeky to see all my contacts mapped out in Google maps, either work or home (or both), and then, poof! - an API appears. It would be particular handy if I could only map out contacts of certain labels (like clients).
Of course, I'm wondering if this functionality was already available through some other web service. Anyone hear of such a thing?
Posted by: Lawrence Salberg | March 7, 2008 6:27 PM
I'll try this new API... Thank you for the advice.
Posted by: Ruben Zevallos Jr. | March 10, 2008 9:04 PM
We implemented this a few days ago in our Tactile CRM.
We put together a bit of tech article about how we did it, and the feature release article.
Posted by: Jake Stride | March 20, 2008 2:39 PM