[Tickets #8410] contacts as a service

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Ticket URL: http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/8410
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  Ticket             | 8410
  Created By         | Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>
  Summary            | contacts as a service
  Queue              | Turba
  Version            | HEAD
  Type               | Enhancement
  State              | Accepted
  Priority           | 1. Low
  Milestone          |
  Patch              |
  Owners             |
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Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org> (2009-07-05 18:35) wrote:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/06/ars-reviews-the-palm-pre-part-1-the-blackberry-killer.ars/2

Pre's approach to contacts is really the future of contact management.  
There's a part in my interview with Russ Daniels, HP's VP of Cloud  
Services Strategy, that I keep coming back to, where Russ is  
describing the hassle of syncing contacts between multiple devices;  
most of this hassle stems from the fact that devices tend to view your  
contacts database as pool of data, instead of a service.

What none of them do is the simple thing of, "tell me the URL for your  
contact service." Additionally, it has to be a service, not a  
repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant  
for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able  
to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it  
synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind  
this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries.

The Pre is the first device I've used that expects all contact data to  
come from a service instead of a repository. Give it your Google,  
Facebook, Exchange, or AIM credentials, and it pulls all of the  
contacts for those services down onto the device. Ultimately, webOS  
presumes that the canonical source for your contact data is a cloud or  
server somewhere, and that your phone merely acts as a local cache for  
this data. (In fact, webOS's contact management is so service-oriented  
that it's kind of a pain to access a traditional contact  
repository?like a standard vcard collection, for instance.)