Ian Murdock’s Weblog

Since I’m on a Google kick these last few days, let me ask a question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time: When are we going to get an API for our Gmail contacts?

Like scads of other people, I use Gmail as my primary mail “client” these days, and that means I want things like email autocomplete to work, which means Gmail has to know about my contacts (or at least their email addresses).

Gmail actually has a really slick interface to contact management that I’d happily use as my main address book. Trouble is, it’s not synchronized with anything, most importantly my cell phone, where I also want that address book to be available. So, for now, I have to maintain two address books—one in Gmail (with just the email addresses), and one in my phone (with everything else). Invariably, it takes effort to keep them “synchronized”, and I’m not always successful at doing so.

I was hopeful that the new “APIs to integrate with existing infrastructure” introduced in Google Apps Premier would finally address this shortcoming—after all, integration with corporate directories would seem to be a feature high on the “must have” list for any enterprise looking at Google. Alas, the APIs appear to only deal with single sign on and account provisioning, and do not appear to do any sort of deeper directory integration.

With an API, Plaxo could presumably synchronize contacts between Gmail and phones (and Outlook etc.), or even better, someone could do over the air synchronization. There have certainly been a wave of interesting products doing similar things using the Google Calendar API. I’ve thought about doing a synchronizer with libgmail, by I’m not sure what would happen (e.g., would I somehow trip the “lockdown in sector 4” alarm, which given my reliance on Gmail, would be pretty darned disruptive).

Thoughts? Anyone else in a similar situation?

Another recent Google discovery: In Google Reader’s mobile interface, there’s now a link at the bottom of each page: “mark these items as read”. Previously, the mobile interface had been more or less unusable because there was no way to mark items read short of actually reading each and every one. Now, if only there were a mobile client a la Gmail for Mobile that would allow me to scroll through my feeds like I do in my browser, only with the Blackberry scroll wheel rather than the mouse scroll wheel, I’d be in information junkie nirvana.

Just stumbled across the button “Check guest and resource availability” when adding a new appointment in Google Calendar. Sure enough, when clicked, a nice little window pops up that allows you to find slots of free time in common across invitees. Not sure if this is available across all of Google Calendar or if this is a Google Apps Premium feature (I’ve had imurdock.com in GAFYD for a while now and upgraded over the weekend). One problem is immediately apparent though: It only appears to be checking the main calendar (I actually have several calendars—work, home, travel, etc.). This is a problem with the SMS interface too, which only appears to operate on the main calendar.