Making contact
Today Yahoo announced the release of their Address Book API — previously only available internally and to selected partners. It follows on from Google’s Contacts Data API and I hope that this is one more nail in the coffin of the password anti-pattern.
Chris has expressed disappointment with the proprietary nature of the response formats and Dave also wishes there were more consistent APIs. It’s a fair point but the situation is still immeasurably better than logging in and scraping the individual address book services.
The sites that have so far abandoned the anti-pattern in favour of best practices are:
Meanwhile a whole bunch of otherwise-great services are still encouraging people to get phished:
- Pownce
- Digg
- Last.fm and
- Twitter …although, to be fair, they’ve got some other problems they need to be concentrating on right now.
The clock is ticking. There really isn’t any excuse any more for asking for my Yahoo Mail or GMail username and password.
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