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:

The clock is ticking. There really isn’t any excuse any more for asking for my Yahoo Mail or GMail username and password.

Have you published a response to this? :

Previously on this day

13 years ago I wrote Copenhagen

Reboot 9.0 is Soylent Green.

14 years ago I wrote Random

Yeah, right.

14 years ago I wrote Reboot

Reboot is over. It was fun.

15 years ago I wrote Feline frustrations

I upgraded to Tiger a little while back. Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed.

17 years ago I wrote Wireless Wonderland

Well, my stint as compère at Silicon Beach is over.

17 years ago I wrote Cute

I was just emailing with Dave Phelan about tonight’s Silicon Beach event. I told him I’d probably be able to recognise him from his webcam pic and asked him to give me a wave.

17 years ago I wrote Silicon Beach

Apparently, I’m going to be the compère for tonight’s Silicon Beach event at the Sumo Bar on Middle Street.

17 years ago I wrote Hercubush

Satire: Keeness and severity of remark; caustic exposure to reprobation; trenchant wit; sarcasm.

17 years ago I wrote Ah, Venice

Richard’s pictures of Venice are giving me really itchy feet.

18 years ago I wrote What's on in Brighton

If anybody in Brighton is looking for a good evening’s entertainment tonight, head on over to the Hanbury Ballroom.