Getting Contact details from mashups
Hi,
I want to get contact details from any Messengers (googletalk, yahoo, Msn etc) or any other social networks like (Orkut, LinkedIn etc) using mashups based on email id.
Can we archive this writing mashups? if yes please let me know how can we archive this.
contact details means:
Name, Address, Phone numbers and etc...
Many Thanks
Sriram
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That's a very big question
The WSO2 Mashup Server can acquire information from Web Services, feeds, web pages, data sources, and more. To the extent that the information you wish to gather is available to you, there should be little trouble in acquiring it for use inside a mashup.
However, that oversimplifies the scope of the problem you have stated. I think you face two primary issues which will make the task you have laid out complicated:
1) Most information sources like those you mention don't follow consistent standards on how to represent contact information, which means you'll have to acquire the information in a site-specific manner. Perhaps something like OpenSocial will provide consistent data formats and protocols across these sites in the future, but for now there's a fair amount of site-specific coding.
2) Much of the contact information available from the services you list is not publicly available. You may have limited access to some of the information for your contacts that have allowed you to see it, but in general most of those services don't provide full contact information to the general public. Not only do you need to have accounts and friends on each of those services to make some of the information available, but you need to include logging in as part of the data acquisition process. For some sites (e.g. web sites with session identifiers embedded in their pages) this can be tedious.
I would start the project by taking a single information source and writing a mashup service that queried against that source using the API or web site or whatever that that source makes available. This will help gauge how hard it will be to write such a service for each of the sources. You can even share these building-block services on mooshup.com so others can take advantage (and extend) your work. Once you have a set of these services, which provide a consistent API to the information sources, a mashup which can invoke these services and do some smart things with the resulting outputs (normalizing, etc.) shouldn't be too difficult.
Good luck and I hope the WSO2 Mashup Server helps you solve this problem.
- Jonathan