Support for Groups

Contacts now supports the collection of contacts into named groups. Groups are displayed in the contact list. When a web page asks for access to your contacts, you may now restrict access to one, or some, of your groups. A contact can belong to any number of groups.

The groups that Contacts displays are imported from your contact sources; if you have groups set up in your Google contact list, or your native address book application, they will be imported. Firefox Contacts will also automatically create a group for each of your contact services.

If you use exactly the same name for a group on two or more services, the groups will be combined.

Support for OAuth

Where possible, Contacts now uses the industry-standard OAuth login mechanism to access websites. You will need to re-connect your browser to your services once to set it up.

In order to support this feature, the contacts 0.4 addon includes another addon called OAuthorizer; so do not be alarmed if you are prompted to install two addons!

Support for merge and split operations

The Contact manager now allows you to merge records from different services that represent the same person, or to split records that were automatically merged.

“Export” command

Contacts can export the unified list of contacts as a VCard file for use in other applications.

JavaScript API documentation

Documentation for the Contacts API is now posted on our site. Web developers are encouraged to experiment with it and provide feedback.

Experimental “services” API

An opt-in service integration API is included as an experiment. Developers can read about it and how to enable it for experimental hacking here.

Native address book integration on the Mac

This feature was introduced in an earlier release, however because of changes in the underlying Gecko architecture, we only support this feature on the latest beta versions of Firefox. If you are not using a Mac, or do not want to import contacts from your native address book, you may continue to use the add-on in Firefox 3.6.

As always, we look forward to your feedback. If you’re in the mood for some hacking, you can find the sources here. Enjoy!

Update: The most recent Contacts release is 0.3. Read about it here

Contacts is an experimental addon from Mozilla Labs, which enhances Firefox (version 3.5)  by making it aware of your online contacts and friend lists. You can then search and browse your contacts in the browser, and a website can ask for permission to access them through an API.

The Service Import pane

The Contact View pane

Autocompletion

Contact Access Permissions screen

Why is this information important? Address books and buddy lists have become an integral part of how we manage our relationships online. Your email addresses, twitter handle and openID are used in hundreds of ways as you connect, follow and share online.

Every desktop operating system, and hundreds of web-based service providers, has some way of representing “who-you-know”. Managing all of this information can be a lot of work. There are multiple copies of your data, and they are inconsistent and disjointed.

This information is also special, because it represents the boundary between “my data” and “your privacy”. When you disclose your friends’ email addresses on a website (maybe you want to invite them to a cool new site you just joined), you are trusting the website to keep that address private. At most sites today, you do this by sharing an entire contact list from some other website (say, your Yahoo address book), and don’t have much ability to restrict what information gets shared. The disclosure of your friends’ contact information is an important step: we think you should be in control of it.

How it works:

The Contacts prototype consists of these pieces:

• A browser-based Contacts database that stays in sync with your address books (so far, it supports Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, Yahoo and Mac OS Address book)
• A generic importer system for Contacts from desktop or web-based address books (so you can implement missing ones)
• An email autocompletion feature, which demonstrates how the browser can auto-complete email addresses on any website. The autocompletion is performed entirely in the browser, without sharing the your list of contacts with the website.
• A Javascript API that websites can use to access the Contacts database, with explicit user permission and filtering

Try it out!

There is an experimental, pre-alpha version of the addon available for download here.

Please be aware that this experimental code. If you are not comfortable with running software that can crash your browser, or cause you lose work, you may want to wait. Please read the Release Notes first.

This version has support for importing from Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter, Yahoo!, and, on MacOS-based machines, the local Address Book. This list of importers is far from final — the import system is a work in progress.  We’re going to keep working on the list of supported importers, and we will be documenting an open importer API to let everybody join in (and, of course, if a site uses an open standard like Portable Contacts, everybody’s job is much easier!)

Dig deeper

As with all Mozilla projects, Contacts is developed in the open, and we welcome participation from everyone.
Hack on the project sources.
Discuss on our forums.
Chat with us on IRC (irc.mozilla.org, #labs)

Learn More

• We’re indebted to our friends and colleagues at Mozilla Messaging, who have been working on address book integration in Thunderbird for years, and have the exciting new Raindrop messaging application in experimental development now. We are working on integrating the Raindrop project with the Contacts API!
• The Portable Contacts initiative is an important effort to define a common data definition for contact data. We use the Portable Contacts definition internally for Contacts.
• The W3C Contacts initiative is defining an industry-standard, cross-platform API for access to contact data in the browser. The spec is new and evolving, and now is the time to experiment and provide feedback!