Archive: March 15th, 2008

Last week Google announced something called the Contacts Data API. This makes me a very happy camper indeed.

I’ve made no secret of my loathing for the password anti-pattern. Asking for a GMail username and password on a third-party website is just plain wrong. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it teaches users how to be phished. I spoke about this at the Social Graph Foo Camp, naming and shaming implementors of the anti-pattern:

Brave representatives from Facebook, Plaxo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dopplr and Pownce showed up to be named and shamed (though most of the shame was reserved for Google in not providing an API for contacts).

To be honest, the impression I got from Google was that I shouldn’t hold my breath but now that they’ve stepped up to the plate and provided an API, there’s really no excuse for websites to ask users to enter their GMail username and password. The API uses AuthSub now but Kevin announced at SXSW that it will support OAuth at some unspecified future date.

Within 24 hours of the Contact Data API’s release, Dopplr had already removed the username/password form and implemented the handshake authentication instead. Bravo, Matt!

So who’s going to be next? Place your bets now. Here are my nominations for the next contenders:

1. Pownce
2. LinkedIn
3. Digg
4. Twitter
5. Last.fm

C’mon Leah, don’t let me down.

I’m starting to see a pattern. Whenever I bitch and moan about something, it seems to get fixed:

• the search functionality on Upcoming,
• the default behaviour of IE8
• and now this.

I think I might be suffering from some sort of reverse paranoia. The whole world seems to be out to help me.

Update: Well, shame on me for not including Flickr in the list of contestants. They’ve implemented a superb import feature that never once asks for a third-party password. Bravo, Flickrites!

Getting from MIX08 in Vegas to South by Southwest in Austin should have been fairly straightforward. All I had to do was change planes in Dallas. But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.

Moments after my flight from Vegas landed, Dallas was hit with an unseasonable snowstorm. My flight to Austin was cancelled. One phone call to American Airlines later, I was booked onto a (much) later flight. Jessica was flying in from London and I managed to get her booked on to the same later flight to Austin. Now we just had to kill some time in an airport. We met up with Natalie who was also trying to either get on a later flight.

Inevitably all the flights were cancelled. At this stage, there were no more hotel rooms to be had in Dallas. The airport infrastructure was beginning to collapse under the weight of a thousand irate passengers.

In the end, Twitter came to the rescue (I know that surfacing serendipity is meant to be Dopplr’s bag but I’m accumulating quite a store of serendipitous Twitter stories). Erin was also in the airport. She read of my predicament and sent a direct message to tell me that she, Peter and Josh had managed to rent a vehicle with space for a few more people. All we had to was get to the rental space. That turned out to be quite a challenging level of the game. It was like Trains, Planes and Automobiles crossed with War Of The Worlds.

Eventually we made it out of the airport and begin a classic American road trip through the Texas night in a gold-coloured rental van, stopping at the occasional gas station to buy toothbrushes and souvenir t-shirts because American Airlines still had our luggage. Meanwhile, other stranded geeks were making their way to Austin by any means necessary. An octet of Britpackers rented a taxi all the way from Dallas (one fine geek didn’t even make it that far).

My simple shot from Vegas to Austin turned out to be quite an adventure. I feel like quite a few us really paid our dues getting to SXSW this year. It was certainly worth it.