Portable Contacts

{{Short description|Open protocol for contact lists}}

Portable Contacts is an open protocol to make it easier for developers to give users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have accrued online. The goal of the project is to increase data portability by creating a common and open specification to bridge proprietary contacts APIs such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API. It combines OAuth, XRDS-Simple and a wire-format based on vCard harmonized with schema from OpenSocial.

The editor of the Portable Contacts standard was Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and the project was co-maintained by Chris Messina.

Portable Contacts has been used by services such as Google Contacts,{{cite web |url=http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/poco/1.0/developers_guide.html |title=Developer's Guide - Portable Contacts API - Google Code |publisher=Google Inc. |accessdate=2011-07-18}} Windows Live Messenger Connect,{{cite web |url=http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/developer/archive/2010/06/28/developing-with-messenger-connect.aspx |title=Developing with Messenger Connect: Recognizable & intuitive |first=Angus |last=Logan |date=2010-06-28 |accessdate=2011-07-18}} as well as other specification such as OStatus.