Previous Contacts Identification Using Public APIs

Here is my proposal based on the Google Contact API Integration topic. All commentaries and doubts are more then welcome.

Project Description:

This proposal is based on a suggestion by Eaton posted on Groups.Drupal about Google Summer of Code 2008.

Drupal is a content platform that allow individuals, organizations and communities to express themselves and organize their knowledge and ideas. It has a wide range of uses thanks to a large number of extra features provided by add-on modules, which makes Drupal great for social applications, such as social networks and forums.

Many features, such as user profiling and user relationships, allows better interaction among site users. An issue though, is that users generally have their contacts hosted on other applications such as email services and can’t take advantage of it. This problem can be minimized now that many contact based applications such as Gmail are providing APIs to export user’s contact data to other application.

This project will design and implement a Drupal module that allows users to identify their contacts that already are in a Drupal site. We would implement this idea for Gmail contacts using Google Contact API, but the module will be designed to be easily integratable with other web services (other email clients and social networks that expose their APIs).