Alexander H. Williams

An Android App For Portable Contacts

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I interviewed Sean Sullivan at the Android meeting I attended here in Portland this week.  Sean is a mobile developer who has developed the first Java-based open source library for the Android client and the first Android application for the Portable Contacts API.

With an emerging platform like Android, everyone is new to the game with lots of room for innovation. Sean noticed that no one had developed an open source library for an Android client. He posted to an Android newsgroup and connected with Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect for Plaxo.

Last Friday, Sean started working with Joseph on the application. Smarr wrote Portable Contacts which is now Plaxo’s API. By Monday, they had it working well enough for Smarr to show some screen shots in a presentation he did at the Internet Identity Workshop at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Smarr’s presentation focused on the new “Open Stacks,” demoing the combo of OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and XRDS-Simple. It gives particular insights into the play between identity providers, content aggregators and the social networks. Smarr maintains that Open Stacks will take us beyond the widget phase and to the better promise of the “social web.”

I would also reccommend reading the posts from the Real McCrea about the workshop and his look at this past week’s one-year anniversary of OpenSocial.