Microformats to Portable Contacts API
The Portable Contacts API is designed to enable users to securely port their friend lists or address books from one site to another. At the moment most social networking and address book sharing sites have their own proprietary contacts API’s. The major ones are Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API, but there are many more. It takes a great deal of time to write the interfaces to link each of these sites together and enable users to share data.
Portable Contacts is an attempt to build an open specification which can be used across sites. It builds on a number of pre-existing technologies with its data structures based around OpenSocial and vCard. It should create a common access pattern and contact schema for everyone to use.
We are building a number of experimental tools to explore the Portable Contacts API concept.
- hCard to Portable Contacts API demo
- hCard-XFN pattern to Portable Contacts API demo
- hResume to Portable Contacts API demo
Note: Portable Contacts API is still in development and the current specification is in Draft C.