Comments on: How about a Gmail Contacts API?

By: Xoxe

Xoxe — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:02:49 +0000

One question, use Google Apps for you domain ianmurdock.com?

By: Garth

Garth — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:22:58 +0000

You could probably connect to the google talk xmpp servers with http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-xmpp.html or something, then find out the right commands to pull down your contact list and all thier vcards (I think that is how xmpp does it)

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:17:47 +0000

Of course.. I’ve got Google Talk on my Blackberry already, and it can already “see” (at least in some limited fashion) all of my Gmail contacts. All that’s needed is for Google Talk to synchronize with the Blackberry address book, and there would be over the air synchronization. Wouldn’t that be something? Here’s where having the source code would be really nice.. -ian

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:08:33 +0000

Hmm.. You’re right, Google Talk for the Blackberry has all contacts listed under “Unsubscribed”. So, it must be all of them. Now to see if you can get more information than just email address.. -ian

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:07:40 +0000

Ooh.. All contacts, or just the ones on the Quick Contacts list? -ian

By: Rob Taylor

Rob Taylor — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:27:10 +0000

You can actually access all your gmail contacts via XMPP (or at least, you used to be able to )

By: Victor Titarchuk

Victor Titarchuk — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:23:22 +0000

I have been looking for a solution that would offer both Google Calendar, GMail, and Contacts sync with Outlook and my smart phone. I found useful a solution that is described by “engtech” in his blog entry “The Holy Grail of Synchronization” that was last updated on 2006/09/19. [url=]http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/08/11/the-holy-grail-of-synchronization-how-to-synchronize-microsoft-outlook-multiple-locations-google-calendar-gmail-ipod-and-mobile-phone-with-funambol-scheduleworld/[/url]
Perhaps it may be of use until Google will release a Gmail Google API.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:36:09 +0000

This is actually something that has exercised us a little bit over at the Bongo Project (http://www.bongo-project.org/). Right now, there isn’t really a contacts protocol.

Many mailers have built-in support for LDAP, but it’s patchy. Some will do read-only, some read-write. Many have different ideas of which schema they will access – is it looking for inetOrgPeople, or some other type? How do you maintain your lists of contacts who aren’t part of your organisations directory in that? It’s not a great solution.

We already have a standard for contact info – vcard. You could do a vcard-over-dav type thing, similar to ics/webdav, and that would work ok. You could even have a simple RESTful API to do that.

It’s not terribly hard, really, but the main issue is e-mail client support. The “if you build it, they will come” attitude probably won’t work very well in this example.

Our idea currently is looking at something like the Plaxo Tbird extension (or similar – there are a few) and seeing if we can modify it or use it as-is. Supporting many mail clients would be a pain, though.