And similarly with portable contacts where we said, OK, we've got six contacts formats.
The OAuth standard and Portable Contacts are both examples of this.
This model is expressed in the Portable Contacts standard, which is also used in OpenSocial for people and friends.
The person specification in OpenSocial is the same as the Portable Contacts standard, which was developed in parallel.
Similarly, Portable Contacts maps well to other sites with people lists, such as webmail, and the open source gadget standard has been broadly adopted by different companies.
Glow sill use many of the same open protocols and standards that Cliqset implemented, including Activity Streams, Salmon, PubSubHubbub and Portable Contacts.
Friend Connect runs code on our servers to connect these open standards — OpenID for login, Portable Contacts and OAuth for connecting your friend lists from many sites, and OpenSocial for creating applications.
Along the way, I have been both a cheerleader for all of the building blocks of the new "open stack" (including OpenID, OAuth, XRDS-Simple, microformats, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial) and one of the most vocal critics of Facebook.
By accessing Content through the Contacts Data API or Portable Contacts API for use in your service or application, you are agreeing to enable your users to export their contacts data to other services or applications of their choice in a way that's substantially as fast and easy as exporting such data from Google Contacts, subject to applicable laws.
For example, about half of the references in the Portable Contacts API specs are to IETF RFCs while the other half are to specs primarily authored by Google and Yahoo! employees outside of any standards body (OpenSocial, OAuth, OpenSearch, XRDS-Simple, etc).
