Portable Contacts was 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. The goal of the project was to increase

data portability Data portability is a concept to protect users from having their data stored in "silos" or "walled gardens" that are incompatible with one another, i.e. closed platforms, thus subjecting them to vendor lock-in and making the creation of data backup ...

by creating a common and open specification to bridge proprietary contacts

Application programming interfaces An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

(API) such as Google's

GData Gdata may refer to: * GData, the Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial ...

Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API. It combines OAuth, XRDS-Simple and 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 was used by services such as

Google Contacts Google Contacts is a contact management service developed by Google. It is available as an Android mobile app, a web app, or on the sidebar of Gmail as part of Google Workspace. History Google Contacts originated as the built-in contacts man ...

Windows Live Messenger Connect Live Connect (previously ''Messenger Connect'', ''Live Services'' and ''Windows Live Dev'') is a collection of APIs and common controls that allow developers to have a deeper control and offers access to the core Windows Live services and data thr ...

, as well as other specification such as OStatus.

References

{{reflist

External links

homepage of Portable Contacts
(archive, original site died, later cloned by a spammer)

(archive) Application programming interfaces Business cards