Mozilla Labs' Contacts in the Browser Updated
by Joe Brockmeier - Apr. 02, 2010Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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The Mozilla Labs team has updated its Contacts extension that brings in contacts from online services. This release brings in importers for Plaxo and LinkedIn, as well as many other improvements.
What's it do? This is still in the early development phase, but the ultimate goal is to let users keep their contacts in the Web browser, and allow them to be used by browser add-ons or Web sites. (With permission, of course.) Not just the Thunderbird address book, but contacts from a bunch of services that we use regularly like Gmail and LinkedIn.
If you think about how many services we work with daily that have contacts and the work involved with trying to keep our contacts synchronized between services, it makes a lot of sense. Right now, Contacts supports the local address book, Gmail contacts, Twitter's address book, Plaxo contacts, and LinkedIn. The import feature is extensible, so other providers can develop importers if the Mozilla crew doesn't get to them.
The new release brings in support for refreshing individual services, and will show you in the address book where each person's data comes from. Contacts also supports the up and coming Webfinger and hCard formats for providing contact information. If you have a Google profile, you're already "Webfinger-enabled" so contacts can query your profile to get more information about you.
The features are moving along pretty quickly. OStatic first covered the project just a few weeks ago, so it's good to see how quickly they're moving on adding new importers and features.
What I really hope to see here very soon is the ability to use this with Mozilla Weave and sync my contacts across all my browsers and OSes. The ability to keep the contacts in my browser isn't terribly useful yet, since it adds an additional layer of complexity to sync with the data sources in each browser. (Though using more than three computers/VMs with Firefox may be a non-standard use case.) But, overall, this is something I'd really love to see reach maturity and graduate from Labs to mainstream Firefox. What do you think?
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