Re: Why not vCard?

On 9 Sep 2010, at 18:45, Rich Tibbett wrote:

> A number of web services use Portable Contacts and OpenSocial as the basis of Contact Information Sharing. Traditional Address Books, for the most part, use vCard. The Contacts API acts in the space between the device and the web and so choosing a device facing or web facing paradigm is going to result in someone losing data in transfer somewhere. Someone is going to be unhappy and so if we displease everybody equally but arrive at a workable solution, without re-inventing the formats, then perhaps we could live with that.

I assume that most devices (eg mobile phones) would use vCard in their address books?
From a usability side - if you gunna upset people - on their device is the last place to do it.

> My current plan was to stick with the basic Portable Contacts set included in the spec and then provide clear extension guidelines for developers to provide the larger set of OpenSocial properties as required.

Why are these Open Social properties so important in a users *address* book ?
eg: heroes, pets, turnOffs, turnOns, scaredOf, happiestWhen, bodyType, tvShows...
Do you really want to put those explicitly in the API?
Shouldn't they (and everyone else's) be available via an extension mechanism?

Contacts API should aim for the core - based on the most widely used *industry* *standard*.

Cheers

Renato Iannella
http://renato.iannella.it

Received on Friday, 10 September 2010 00:24:20 UTC