PoCo + OAuth: Help To Handle and Keep Control on Your Contacts

Lately I often refuse to take invitation / request from friends to use my data from Social Networks. Why? Lets take an example with Facebook. Friends ask whether they can import my birthday into their calendar ... to accept, I need to give this application the full right to access my profile, data and all friends data.

Google Contacts has now the open standard solution 'Portable Contacts' (PoCo) and explains

Portable Contacts to the rescue! Portable Contacts (affectionately known as "PoCo") is an open standard that aims to make it easier to access "who-you-know" information in a secure way -- this means sites don't have to employ the "password anti-pattern" of scraping websites.

Using PoCo is 'easy' to use because it builds on existing standards and libraries. In fact, PoCo uses the same data format as the OpenSocial REST protocol. The 'secure' part is provided by OAuth, an authentication mechanism that allows users to grant access to only certain sets of data (address books in this case).

Web developers can now access Google Contacts using the OAuth and Portable Contacts standards ...

more on Google's Social Web Blog