Open Letter to the Developer Community

At Plaxo, we are committed to the notion that users own their data and should have the freedom to take it with them to the other tools and services they use. That's why we co-authored the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web in September, 2007, and why we've been taking a very active role in fostering adoption of the open building blocks for the Social Web, including OpenID, OAuth, microformats, OpenSocial, and Portable Contacts. (In fact, I'm so passionate about this topic that I do a weekly Internet show on it, called "The Social Web TV"!)

This site, which is admittedly a work-in-progress, is where we will surface information on the various methods developers can use to access data from Plaxo, as well as get access to libraries to aid in your implementation of support for our APIs. The goal is not just to have a bunch of Plaxo-specific APIs that you can develop against; we're working toward a set of open-spec APIs that can be adopted by anyone, with the lofty hope of universal adoption.

The first of these, Portable Contacts, is an easy-to-implement "people data" API that provides secure access to both traditional address book data and to modern social application data (profiles and friends lists). We've been very involved in the development of this new building block and in evangelizing for its adoption across a wide range of services. And naturally, Plaxo is already a PortableContacts provider, including full support for discovery and protected access via XRDS-Simple and OAuth, respectively.

» Learn more about accessing your Plaxo data with PortableContacts

We're also working on our implementation of the full set of OpenSocial RESTful APIs. Actually, through collaboration with the OpenSocial community, Portable Contacts is now fully wire-compatible with the access-only, people data subset of the OpenSocial RESTful APIs, while it remains an independent building block that anyone can implement. This means that any compliant OpenSocial RESTful API provider will also be a PortableContacts provider, and likewise, OpenSocial apps can easily consume our PortableContacts endpoint. We're big believers in OpenSocial, and we will continue to roll out increasing support for it over time.

For linking and sharing your online profiles, we are an OpenID relying party, which means you don't need to create yet-another-username-and-password when creating a Plaxo account, nor do you need to re-enter your profile info from scratch (if your OpenID provider supports the simple registration extension, as many do). And our public profile pages are tagged with microformats, so you can easily access this data from other services.

Another area which could benefit from a common open-spec API is calendar data. While we are not currently working on this, you could imagine an individual in the community who is passionate about the topic stepping forward to lead a "Portable Calendar" effort, which could leverage much of the work we did with Portable Contacts to create a similar interoperability solution just for calendar data. In the meantime, we have full support for sharing and subscribing to iCal feeds.

Of course, while we've been working toward the vision of universal open spec APIs, we did also develop of full set of Plaxo-specific APIs, which we use to power Plaxo 3.0 and our downloadable plug-ins. They're focused on traditional address book and calendar functionality and span both access and sync. If you have interest in doing a custom integration with Plaxo that requires deeper access than what is available through Portable Contacts, please describe a bit about what you're seeking to do in an email addressed to .

So join us in empowering users to take their data with them across the social web, and let us know what more we can do to help this cause!

John McCrea
VP of Marketing