Address book portability. I want you to tell your friends about us

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Address book portability. I want you to tell your friends about us

dogboy

8:31 pm on Mar 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

Log into any big social site today and they ask you if you want to cross reference your Gmail or Yahoo address book with their member list. Then they allow you to add everyone in your list that already signed up with them and email the rest a note inviting them to join....

What part of data portability are we talking about here? Or is this even a data portability issue? The lines in my mind are are still very foggy here. Anyone with knowledge about what I'm touching on here? At the very least I want you to come to my site and have the ability to write all your friends in your yahoo contact list a note and invite them to come. What do need to get this up and running?

mack

6:37 pm on Mar 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

A lot of services use this sort of system Bebo, facebook, myspace and many more. I think the importaint factor is the ability to be able to have access to the data. In most cases this will be done using an API or custom software in agreement with the service hosting the data you are after.

Mack.

dogboy

3:46 pm on Mar 24, 2009 (gmt 0)

right... for example, if you are on FB you start here:
[facebook.com...]

...then they kick you over to yahoo:
[login.yahoo.com...]
%2FWSLogin%2FV1%2Fwslogin%3Fappid%3D0rjU68zIkY0rTIpIFb93i3vBABPxcl8-%26appdata
%3D%252Ffindfriends.php%253Fyahoo_import%253D2%26ts%3D1237845687
%26sig%3De50bb832e734364243f8a7e1ae628a27%26.scrumb%3D0&.intl=&.pd=c%3DonXcdRqp2e4vLLNr7OxGay8-
<line breaks added to prevent side scroll>

...see the mention of the 'API' and 'login' in the string? Then it kicks me back to FB here:

http://www.facebook.com/yahoo/loggedin.php?appid=0rjU68zIkY0rTIpIFb93i3vBABPxcl8-
&token=ABIHyEkFUQ5nSoSZHBugr_PczOjr7UStg1MX_6WqqITJr3.
v&appdata=%2Ffindfriends.php%3Fyahoo_import
%3D2&ts=1237845778&sig=50114574c4f65d3053dd62783f76f01a
<line breaks added to prevent side scroll>

...and you can see 'loggedin.php?appid', which makes me think that we basically we have a script on FB that interacts with Y!'s API, right? So the question is are we dealing in some kind of 'data portability' open standard, or is this just custom?

[edited by: tedster at 2:44 pm (utc) on Mar. 28, 2009]

dogboy

4:03 pm on Mar 24, 2009 (gmt 0)

ok, found it for yahoo:

"The Yahoo! Address Book (AB) API is a JSON/XML interface for accessing and updating the Yahoo! Address Book using a web service. It can be used to look up addresses for auto-completion of emails, to add addresses for future shipping information, to obtain unique identifiers for network invites, or to sync with another address book."
[developer.yahoo.com...]

...and Google's new API is here:
The Google Contacts Data API allows client applications to view and update Contacts content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user's contacts, edit or delete content in an existing contact, and query the content in an existing contact.

[code.google.com...]