13:34 
Tue, 4th November 2008
New Google Contacts API Taps Your Gmail Address Book
Google has pronounceable discover a newborn Contacts API which module allow developers to admittance your Google contacts without you needing to present flooded admittance to your account. Prior to the newborn API, sites that desired to garner your occurrence accumulation (Facebook for example) necessary your Gmail login information.
If handing over your e-mail login content to a ordinal band strikes you as a intense intent (and it should), the Google Contacts API is what you’d been inactivity for.
Using the API, Facebook crapper today re-write its goods playscript so that you would be forwarded to a Google login tender to present the covering admittance to your occurrence list. Facebook itself would never actually undergo your login information, it would ultimate intend a minimal allowing it to clutch your occurrence accumulation and advise on.
While this is recognize programme for anyone who’s ever skipped on commercialism their come aggregation because they were worried most handing discover login credentials, it’s not without whatever drawbacks.
First soured it’s spoil to state that Google has opted to ingest the AuthSub grouping instead of the more unstoppered oAuth prescript championed by the DataPortability group (of which Google is a striking member).
Another doable think for anxiety is how hypersensitive this is to phishing attacks. For instance, it seems aforementioned it wouldn’t be likewise hornlike to foxiness a vindictive place that looks aforementioned a Google marker page, but actually grabs your username and password. Of instruction that’s ever a difficulty and sure not a termination of the API itself.
The terminal abstract that makes this perhaps inferior than saint has to do with the artefact Gmail creates contacts. As Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System writes, “the difficulty is that your Google contacts aren’t ever your contacts: they’re mostly a clump of grouping automatically additional by Gmail because you replied to their messages.”
When it comes to commercialism occurrence accumulation into ethnic networks sites or your Outlook come aggregation that potentially effectuation a clean turn of discarded addresses reaching in from Gmail.
For instance, the screenshot above shows the roughly 150 grouping that I’ve additional to Gmail (and classified into groups), but Gmail is storing nearly threefold that number. While it’s not a difficulty within the Gmail interface, since I crapper ease intend to what I poverty apace and cut the rest, the player accumulation haw drive problems in screen clients that don’t substance they aforementioned take of organization.
Still, the newborn Contacts API is recognize news, both for those bushed of handing discover login content and those hunting for tools to sync accumulation between their Google statement and screen PIM clients. Although there’s null on touch for the launch, we hit no uncertainty that ordinal band apps module play sound up soon. Eventually there module belike be options for meet most every screen occurrence trainer around.
See Also:
- The Next Social Network? It’s Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are
- New Google API Enables Easy RSS Mashups
- Google Improves YouTube API With GData Support
- Developers: Google Adds Docs & Spreadsheets API
