The Contacts experiment explores what is possible when we add contact management to Firefox.

The Contacts add-on integrates with local and web-based address books to bring all of a user’s contact data into a single database, which can then be used by browser extensions or web content.  The user must grant permission before any content can be used by a website, and can choose exactly which fields and personal records to disclose.

So far, we have implemented importers for GMail, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and for the Mac OS X Address Book database; we have also constructed an e-mail address auto-completion feature that uses the Browser Contacts database to help the user fill email fields on any web page.  We’ve recently added a discovery feature that finds icons on Gravatar, personal pages from Flickr, Amazon, and Yelp, and automatic profile discovery through Webfinger and HCard.

Download the latest version of the experimental Contacts add-on here. Choose “Contacts” from the “Tools” menu to configure, once you’ve installed it.

Try autocompletion and the address book API at our demonstration page.

Michael Hanson has posted some technical discussion of the extension on his blog.

Release Notes:

Version 0.2:

• Support for per-service “Refresh”. If you’ve changed your twitter friend list, a single click will update your twitter contacts. This lays the groundwork for automatic refresh in a later release.
• Per-service data display. In the contact detail screen, you can see where the data about each contact came from.
• An importer for LinkedIn. Note that you will need to go through a security image to get your information from LinkedIn; they don’t have a fully automatic system yet.
• An importer for Plaxo. Plaxo was the first site to support Portable Contacts, and we were able to integrate with them using 100% standards-based code. Way to go Plaxo!
• A “person search” system that automatically finds information about a contact by accessing public data on the internet. When you’re looking at a contact, you can click the “Search” button and Contacts will find information out on the web about the person. Remember, Contacts is only using public search interfaces to do this, and the only communication is between your browser and the target website.
• We’ve included search implementations for Gravatar, Yelp, Amazon, and Flickr.
• We’ve also included automatic discovery and loading of Webfinger and HCard data. Webfinger is a new protocol that allows a program to query an email address to get more information about a user. Very few sites support it yet but we’re very excited about it and will be writing more about it soon. HCard is a standard that allows contact information aobut a person to be embedded in a web page.
• One of the best public implementations of Webfinger and HCard right now is through Gmail and Google Profiles. If a Gmail user has created a Google Profile and made it world-visible, their “@gmail.com” email address will become Webfinger-enabled. Contacts can then query that address to get a list of links, find the HCard link, and load it automatically. The Google Profile includes a small bit of HCard data — mostly employer, name, and a list of links to other websites — which Contacts will automatically add to the user record.
• Various bugfixes, including international character support on Mac native import, and incorrect rendering on the contact view page.

Version 0.1:

• Gmail import requires that you have an active session with GMail.
• Twitter import requires a saved Twitter username-password pair (i.e. saved with the Firefox Password Manager, by clicking “Remember” after logging into Twitter)
• Native address book import is only implemented for MacOS 10.5 and 10.6.
• Gravatar icon import may take a long time on large address books; you may receive the “slow script” warning dialog and need to give the script permission to keep running.
• Duplicate email addresses or display names from a single service are not de-duplicated; i.e. if you have two entries for “johndoe@gmail.com” you will receive two Contact entries for them.  Duplicates across services are properly de-duplicated.
• Saved permissions don’t remember the list of people, only the list of fields.
• E-mail autocompletion works on any text input named “e-mail”, “email”, or “recipients”.