Since I’m on a Google kick these last few days, let me ask a question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time: When are we going to get an API for our Gmail contacts?
Like scads of other people, I use Gmail as my primary mail “client” these days, and that means I want things like email autocomplete to work, which means Gmail has to know about my contacts (or at least their email addresses).
Gmail actually has a really slick interface to contact management that I’d happily use as my main address book. Trouble is, it’s not synchronized with anything, most importantly my cell phone, where I also want that address book to be available. So, for now, I have to maintain two address books—one in Gmail (with just the email addresses), and one in my phone (with everything else). Invariably, it takes effort to keep them “synchronized”, and I’m not always successful at doing so.
I was hopeful that the new “APIs to integrate with existing infrastructure” introduced in Google Apps Premier would finally address this shortcoming—after all, integration with corporate directories would seem to be a feature high on the “must have” list for any enterprise looking at Google. Alas, the APIs appear to only deal with single sign on and account provisioning, and do not appear to do any sort of deeper directory integration.
With an API, Plaxo could presumably synchronize contacts between Gmail and phones (and Outlook etc.), or even better, someone could do over the air synchronization. There have certainly been a wave of interesting products doing similar things using the Google Calendar API. I’ve thought about doing a synchronizer with libgmail, by I’m not sure what would happen (e.g., would I somehow trip the “lockdown in sector 4” alarm, which given my reliance on Gmail, would be pretty darned disruptive).
Thoughts? Anyone else in a similar situation?
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.
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.
You can actually access all your gmail contacts via XMPP (or at least, you used to be able to )
Ooh.. All contacts, or just the ones on the Quick Contacts list? -ian
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
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
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)
One question, use Google Apps for you domain ianmurdock.com?