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3. 2. 1. Contact. The API has landed

3. 2. 1. Contact. The API has landed
Posted by Sebastian Kanthak, Google Contacts Team

Have you ever been on a web-site that asked you for your Google username and password so that it can import your Gmail contact list? Did you think twice before giving out that information, hoping the web-site would not use it to access your credit card information stored with Google Checkout? Now you don’t have to!

We’re happy to announce the availability of our Google Contacts Data API that gives programmatic access to your contact list. The contact list is shared among Google applications like Gmail, Reader, Calendar, and more.

The Google Contacts Data API allows you to own your own contact data. We expect the API to be useful for a big range of applications. For example, developers can use it to:

• Import a user’s Google contacts into their web or desktop application
• Export their application’s contact list to Google
• Write sync applications for mobile devices or popular, desktop-based contact management applications

The Contacts API allows developers to create, read, update, and delete contacts using the Google Data protocol, based on AtomPub. It also allows for incremental sync by supporting the “updated-min” and “showdeleted” parameters. Please take a look at our documentation to see all the options supported.

We know that this Google Data API is the most requested feed by our developer community, so we’re very excited about this release. We are committed to actively work with you to improve the Google Contacts Data API and we’d like to hear back from you in our Google Contacts API group.

We hope that APIs like this one mean you will never have to give out your username and password to other sites again. Please encourage all sites you use to switch to this API for accessing your Google contact data.

[Source: http://googledataapis.blogspot.com]