Contacts in the Browser 0.3 released

mozilla

31 responses

Release 0.3 of Firefox Contacts is now live – you can download it here.

In this release, we’ve added support for Yahoo! and Facebook contacts, put people into the AwesomeBar, and enhanced Contacts’ ability to find information about people by asking around the web.

As part of this release, we’ve added experimental support for “person:” URLs. You can look up people in your contacts list, or anybody on the web, using this technique. Firefox will combine information found from your local address book with web-based information to create a profile page about the person. For example, try “person:mhanson@gmail.com” or “person:http://facebook.com/btaylor”. Mike has written a detailed explanation of how auto-discovery works, if you are curious or want to experiment with it.

Contact view with combined data from multiple=As always, we welcome your feedback on our discussion list.

Release Notes

  • Support for Yahoo! import. You will need to log in and retrieve a security code from Yahoo! to enable the importer.
  • Support for Facebook import and discovery. When you connect to Facebook you will need to authorize Firefox Contacts to access your account. This integration is using the brand-new Facebook Graph API, and may still have some hiccups. You may need to Refresh your connection to Facebook on occasion to make it work properly.
  • Support for “person:” addresses, and auto-completion of people in the AwesomeBar. Just start typing a contact’s name in the location bar and it will automatically suggest completions.
  • Support for autocompletion of HTML5 input fields with type “email” and “tel”. (Try it on the demo page)
  • Much-enhanced people search capabilities. The installed discovery modules will run automatically when you view a contact. Discovery modules for Webfinger, HCard import, Google Social Graph, Facebook, Gravatar, Yelp, Amazon, and Flickr are included.
  • Automatic combination of data discovered through discovery. Firefox will load “profile pages” that it finds and combine their information into the contact. Because it is being run on the client, Firefox can access protected pages that are not visible to web-crawler-type systems; for example, it can access a Gowalla location trace from a friend, or a Facebook birthday, because it is already logged in as you. Note that this only works with sites that support standard automatic discovery mechanisms like HCard, RSS, and ActivityStreams.
  • Support for non-contact people in the AwesomeBar. You may enter “person:xxx”, where xxx is any email address or URL, and Firefox will do what it can to display information about that person. Information from your local address book (if any) will be combined with information that can be discovered from sources on the web.

And, as always, the source is available at:
http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/people

31 responses

  1. silanea wrote on :

    Nice concept, but it does not really work with Minefield (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:2.0b4pre) Gecko/20100805 Minefield/4.0b4pre). Clicking a contact gives me "Firefox doesn't know how to open this address, because the protocol (person) isn't associated with any program.", and I had to disable both NoScript and Adblock Plus, otherwise clicking the Facebook connect button would give me a blank page.

  2. 96edwy wrote on :

    Darn its not compatable with firefox 4 yet 🙁

  3. mozilla_labs wrote on :

    Take a look at the "Show Data Sources" link on a contact record, Paul. You'll see that all we persist is the facebook ID and display name of a friend; everything else is fetched dynamically when you view the person record, using the Graph API. That is, incidentally, why the display of Facebook data sometimes stops working — we're having some trouble maintaining our access token. "Refreshing" the Facebook connection renews our access token, which lets us do live retrieval of the data again.

  4. Paul T wrote on :

    Isn't this a violation of Facebook's TOS (even the latest iteration)? If not what is the principle at work, that Facebook agrees to, that makes this data scraping/capture not a violation?

  5. Marc K. wrote on :

    I’m waiting for the following features:

    – Merge contacts
    * Prevent duplication upon refreshing

    – Definitely bi-directional sync
    * Maybe incorporate a Funambol server?

    – Ability to remove contacts
    * I don’t need everyone I follow on Twitter in my Address Book

    – Ability to import from Multiple Twitter accounts

  6. LrdScar wrote on :

    Love this with one minor exception.

    I have some ppl who have a mc before there last name, sometimes they have a space other times its just one word.
    The ability to merge entries would be a major plus for this add on

  7. person: wrote on :

    Contact import is great, but what about syncing contacts to gmail, windows live, yahoo, aim, etc.

  8. Ahriman wrote on :

    Hi, i love this extension but i have one problem. When i try to write my email adress in blog, here for example, i only can see the contacts of this extension but not my autocomplete texts. I need write manually if i use Contacs.

    Great job mozillalabs!

    Sorry for my bad english, thanks.

  9. KlawWarYoshi wrote on :

    well great addon/idea
    but i have got some critical ideas
    – what about connecting the addon to thunderbird as well
    – editing exisitng contacts would also be great
    – and an icon like adblocker currently has or an other shortcut would also be great

    as well as the following services:
    thunderbird/ outlook/ ovi contact manager
    SVZ/ MVZ etc and others

    1. mozilla_labs wrote on :

      Thunderbird and Outlook work is ongoing, stay tuned.

  10. Manu wrote on :

    I really appreciate the efford to bring the lots of contacts together which are spread over several locations.
    Working on a german Windows 7 with FF 3.6.3 I noted several bugs (with Google contacts & Facebook added):
    eg. Adresses are missing (Show data sources address1naddress2n…)
    urls are showing up like http://
    phone numbers name: work;type=fax
    Number/date format english only
    Unsorted Contact list

    There are some suggestions I have:
    Possible concat of contacts,
    Images from Google contacts (I just finished uploading photos to my 200 contacts in Google contacts :))
    and of course getting contacts from Thunderbird!

    Looking forward to this project!
    Manu

  11. jimspice wrote on :

    Trying to connect with Facebook and keep getting a "The connection was reset" error.

  12. David wrote on :

    where the hell are phone numbers and addresses ?

    1. mhanson wrote on :

      Depends on the source, David. The native importer, Plaxo, Google, and Yahoo should all export that data if it is present. LinkedIn does not include that data in the export set, and Facebook does not allow export of that information to general-purpose applications.

      1. David wrote on :

        I've seen native applications pull numbers before. Can we make contacts just as crafty ?

  13. Gerv wrote on :

    > person:http://facebook.com/btaylor

    Are you sure you want to do this using the protocol part of a URL? The feed: "protocol" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed:), which did a similar thing (feed:http://…) caused all sorts of problems with "unknown protocol" errors. Various Mozilla community members wrote rants about it, I seem to remember. In that case, MIME types was the right solution. I don't know if it is in this case. But I just wanted to flag up the issue before this usage gets embedded.

    Gerv

  14. Gerv wrote on :

    > person:http://facebook.com/btaylor

    Are you sure you want to do this using the protocol part of a URL? The feed: "protocol" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed:), which did a similar thing (feed:http://…) caused all sorts of problems with "unknown protocol" errors. Various Mozilla community members wrote rants about it, I seem to remember. In that case, MIME types was the right solution. I don't know if it is in this case. But I just wanted to flag up the issue before this usage gets embedded.

    Gerv

  15. Gerv wrote on :

    > person:http://facebook.com/btaylor

    Are you sure you want to do this using the protocol part of a URL? The feed: "protocol" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed:), which did a similar thing (feed:http://…) caused all sorts of problems with "unknown protocol" errors. Various Mozilla community members wrote rants about it, I seem to remember. In that case, MIME types was the right solution. I don't know if it is in this case. But I just wanted to flag up the issue before this usage gets embedded.

    Gerv

    1. mozilla_labs wrote on :

      Thanks for the feedback, Gerv. I'm not quite sure what the right format would be, either… if it's somebody that's already in your address book, you can just do "person:Mike Hanson" and it works… but we need some way to identify global resources too. More ideas are welcome if you have them.

  16. 093236 wrote on :

    Good job, thank you!
    Currently, it only show one person when using awesome bar to search(person:xxx), I hope it can be show all of the people that contain xxx.

  17. skierpage wrote on :

    Is "my local address book" the one I have built up over 10 years in Thunderbird?

    1. mozilla_labs wrote on :

      No, but we're making good progress on getting Thunderbird contacts in there. The local database is in an old format that is somewhat difficult to read natively from Firefox. We should be able to show progress soon.

  18. Abc wrote on :

    Agree with the above.. it's a bit annoying when I have to write out gmail.com when I want to check my email…

  19. GaryF wrote on :

    Is there any way of disabling the AwesomeBar integration or reducing the scoring for people? Pretty much any handful of letters I type now has people dominating the results, where sites I visit used to rank highly. For example, "fa" used to be enough to get me to facebook but now ALL of my top results are people.

    It would seem that you'd rarely search for people and often search for sites.

    1. x-pilot wrote on :

      Same here. I hope, that it will be possible to turn off this feature in next release :-/

    2. mozilla_labs wrote on :

      Hm, yes, good points. We'll turn down the volume in a dot release soon.

    3. mozilla_labs wrote on :

      Version 0.3.2, pushed this morning, puts much less into the awesomebar. It requires a full-name match on first name, last name, or email account (the part before the '@').

      1. x-pilot wrote on :

        Great, but unfortunately, Contacts brought another one issue into the Awesomebar: after installing/enabling Contacts, Awesomebar starts to blink: try to type any domain with disabled and enabled extension: in first case, awesomebar will just underline new letter (if it matches with domain in history), in the second one – after typing of new letter it will hide awesomebar for a little amount of time and show it with underlined letter. And this is annoying. :-/

        (Tried on
        Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; ru; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100413 Firefox/3.6.4,
        Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.3a5pre) Gecko/20100423 Minefield/3.7a5pre and
        Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100413 Firefox/3.6.4)

        1. mozilla_labs wrote on :

          That is annoying. Thanks, I'll log a bug.

  20. David wrote on :

    phone numbers and other stuff isn't showing up , bug ?

  21. Frank J. wrote on :

    nice to have all my contacts in the awesomebar, no I just need something I can import as I dont want to give my contacts to Google or Yahoo…

    actually it is blocking my awesomebar because if I click the down arrow I just see all my people but no websites anymore…