Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation

Google has an API (Application Program Interface - An interface for letting a program/website communicate with another program/website) available in which programmers can leverage people’s Gmail/Google contacts from other applications, called the Google Contacts API.

What does this mean?   Many things really, this type of thing opens up a whole world of communication between programs and devices.

For example – Outlook could be made to sync up with Gmail’s contacts and Gmail’s contacts could be used and referenced in Facebook – and most importantly, all of these would synchronize when a change was made in one of them.  (This would be based on a program being written to allow the communications – but it is now possible.)

The Google Contacts Data API allows client applications to view and update Contacts content in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user’s contacts, edit or delete content in an existing contact, and query the content in an existing contact.

How cool would it be to have this type of contact synchronization?

(Notice the use of “Social Web instead of Web 2.0 - this MUST be a great article…if you have no idea what I am talking about read previous posts about how Web 2.0 is not bad.)

This is a great analogy of some current technology to switchboards of the early telephone system.  The article is called “Switchboard of the Social Web“.

Today’s social web operates in similar fashion to the initial system of “switchboards” during the early introduction of the telephone. Developers of applications have to “plug into” any given platforms application programming interfaces for the purposes of enabling the application to “communicate”…

Google’s recent announcement of OpenSocial is centered around creating a set of “standard API’s” that ultimately interface with all participating social networks. The spin of OpenSocial is centered around Open API thus automating interfaces rather than having developers create new interfaces for each network they want their applications to run on.

Very cool reference and easy to understand.

UPDATE: I found this article: 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally - I’m not sure I totally agree with using Facebook professionally, but some of the same things apply to LinkedIn.

Published: 7/23/2007 6:57 AM
Wow - when Facebook opened up its API’s (special channels into their system which allows others to leverage their software) to the world, they took it up a notch.

I was listening to a podcast last week where a college student said many of his classmates do not even like to use email anymore - they log onto Facebook and send messages to each other from within the system. WOW - that is powerful.

Some have went as far to say “The Facebook Platform reminds many of us of Windows; and people are calling it “the social operating system” on which you can develop your Internet apps.” If this is true - we may have reached a new bar for social applications.