LDAPWiki: Portable Contacts

Overview#

Portable Contacts is an open protocol for developers to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the web.

Although we think Portable Contacts is extremely important, this project appears to be stalled with no updates since 2009.

The goal of the project is to increase data portability by creating a common and open specification to bridge proprietary contacts Application Programing Interfaces (API) such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API.

Portable Contacts combines

OAuth
XRDS-Simple
a wire-format based on vCard

harmonized with schema from OpenSocial.

The editor of Portable Contacts specification was Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and the project co-maintained by Chris Messina.

Portable Contacts is used by services such as:

Google Contacts
Windows Live Messenger Connect[2]
as well as other specification such as OStatus.

More Information#

There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:

My Contacts

[#1] - http://portablecontacts.net/ - based on information obtained 2016-03-27-