WebProNews

Google has begun implementing Portable Contacts, an open standard that aims to make it easier to access your contacts in a secure way when sites ask you to invite friends when you sign up.

Lane LiaBraaten of the OpenSocial Team says, "Too many of these sites access your list of friends by asking for your username and password so they can sign in as you and scrape your contact lists. The problem is that once a website has your password, it can access all sorts of data, not just your contacts."

According to PortableContacts.net, the Portable Contacts project seeks to create:

- A common access pattern and contact schema that any site can provide

- Well-specified authentication and access rules

- Standard libraries that can work with any site

- and absolutely minimal complexity, with the lightest possible toolchain requirements for developers.

Portable Contacts (or PoCo as they call it) builds on existing standards and libraries. It uses the same data format as the OpenSocial REST protocol, and the secure part comes from OAuth. Developers who want to implement PoCo need to register their domain and get an OAuth key.

Then they can use Plaxo's Portable Contacts test client to send test queries. More info can be found within the Portable Contacts Developer's Guide on Google Code.