OAuth vs. Portable Contacts for importing contacts

Question

We are currently using an outdated screen scraper gem to import contacts from gmail/yahoo/etc. I want to update this to use the new OAuth based APIs so users don't have to enter their credentials on our site. I'm really intrigued by the work Plaxo is doing with Portable Contacts which Google also supports. It feels like that is a good direction for read-only access, and it is still backed by OAuth.

Are there any compelling reasons to just go with the standard OAuth API for these providers instead of going the Portable Contacts route? I'd like to know if there are strong reasons to avoid it. I'll still be using straight OAuth for the ones that don't support PC so it's not a question of development time, more one of support and confidence in the new approach.

Answer 1

The idea is that each OAuth implementation will be slightly different where as each Portable Contacts implementation will be the same. It's kind of like a REST API (OAuth) vs. a SOAP API (Portable Contacts --but with the same overhead as OAuth).

So you should theoretically be able to make one Portable Contacts Reader and hook it to any provider who supports it with no additional work.

In reality for now, you'll probably need to work with both Portable Contacts and OAuth-non-portable endpoints. (With most OAuth-non-portable providers hopefully moving towards Portable Contacts).

Answer 2

OAuth Core doesn't define either discovery (leading users to the OAuth URL which will let them authorize the resource to the consumer) or representation (informing the consumer about what authorization the token will provide). Without a spec such as Portable Contacts, these need to agreed upon ad-hoc by the consumer and provider (with discovery probably being simplified to a well-known URL). So Portable Contacts is just answering those questions once for each provider which uses them. You'll need to work out the ad-hoc answers if you want to support providers which don't, but you'll be using the same OAuth Core implementation for all of them anyway.

Portable Contacts itself builds on the OAuth Discovery spec, which seems to be expired without a replacement, unfortunately.