Slug: portable-contacts-progress Date: 2008-09-11 Title: Portable Contacts Progress layout: post

Last night was the Portable Contacts Hackathon at Six Apart, and it looks like some excellent progress was made. Joseph Smarr and Kevin Marks had an hCard–to-vcard-to-portable-contacts transformer working (which I got to see in action).

In addition, David reports:

Brian Ellin of JanRain has successfully combined OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, and the Portable Contacts API to start showing how each of these building blocks should come together. Upon visiting his demo site he logs in using his OpenID. From there, the site discovers that Plaxo hosts his address book and requests access to it via OAuth. Finishing the flow, his demo site uses the Portable Contacts API to access information about his contacts directly from Plaxo. End to end, login with an OpenID and finish by giving the site access to your address book without having to fork over your password.

As Joseph quipped “this is the power of Open, people!”.