[VCARDDAV] portable contacts

Hi everyone, I wanted to make you aware of a community effort called
Portable Contacts (http://portablecontacts.net) that shares many of the same
goals as this group and has already had some promising initial success in
gaining traction.

Portable Contacts was created in the context of related grass-roots
standards like OpenID and OAuth to provide a common, vendor-neutral schema,
protocol, and workflow for letting users access their address book and
friends-list info from any service, with a focus on ease of implementation
and interoperability with existing standards. Our first draft spec was
published in May 2008, and we've since gone through a few revisions, with
active participation from individuals in the grass-roots community and from
many companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, Plaxo, AOL, Sony
Ericsson, and others. We've also worked with the OpenSocial community to
wire-align the "accessing people data" part of the OpenSocial RESTful
Protocol, so any OpenSocial container supporting those APIs is also by
definition a Portable Contacts Provider (and several already are).

More information about Portable Contacts (including the current rev of the
draft spec) can be found at http://portablecontacts.net as well as on our
mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/portablecontacts. I've also now
published Portable Contacts as an IETF I-D (
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-smarr-vcarddav-portable-contacts-00.txt)
to facilitate communication here.

I recently came across the I-D to provide an XML schema for vCard as part of
the vcarddav working group (
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-perreault-vcarddav-vcardxml-00.txt) and
realized that the vcarddav community is also working on many of these same
challenges. Since I think we both share the goal of creating a widespread
standard for accessing contact information online, I'm sure we will both
benefit from talking together and learning from the work we've each done so
far. In fact, looking at the charter for vcarddav, the Portable Contacts
community shares your goal of creating "An address book access protocol
leveraging the vCard data format" and "An XML schema which is semantically
identical to vCard in all ways and can be mechanically translated to and
from vCard format without loss of data", and I think we've made great
progress on both of those goals.

We started with the vCard schema as the core of Portable Contacts, but
expressed in JSON and XML bindings to take advantage of those
developer-friendly and widely used formats, while preserving the semantic
definitions of vCard. We've also added in additional contact fields to more
fully represent the types of data typically describing people on modern
social networking sites, thus spanning the gap between traditional address
books and "social graphs". And we've specified an end-to-end workflow for
discovery, authentication, and access of contact information (drawing on
XRDS-Simple, HTTP Basic and/or OAuth, and a simple REST-like protocol,
respectively), so that a would-be consumer of contact info can "walk up and
use" any compliant provider their user wishes.

I've chatted briefly so far with Marc Blanchet and Lisa Dusseault so far,
but I'd love to hear from the rest of the group on how Portable Contacts
does or doesn't meet the goals of this working group, and where you see
opportunities for our two communities to work together, perhaps even
combining some or all of our specs. I will also do my homework and learn
more about the current state of CardDAV, and please send any
questions/feedback you have on Portable Contacts to this list and/or the
Portable Contacts mailing list, which any of you are free to join.

Thanks! It's great to meet more people that are "fighting the good fight"
for portable contact information! :) js

--
Joseph Smarr
Chief Platform Architect, Plaxo
http://josephsmarr.com