Portable Contacts

From IndieWeb


Portable Contacts (often abbreviated as PoCo) was a proposed 2008 specification for exchange of vCard-compatible contact info using a one-off JSON format, before microformats2, its parsed canonical JSON format, and h-card was specified.

The portablecontacts.net domain died in 2016 and returned in ~2 months as a zombie site (still zombie in 2018), eventually with various bits of plagiarized content on multiple pages that link to a consulting company. See #Site_Death section for details.

Portable Contacts was converged with the OpenSocial Person format, though opensocial.org itself died in 2014, two years before the PoCo site died.

IndieWeb Examples

There are no known IndieWeb sites publishing or consuming PoCo.

IndieWeb sites are alternatively publishing h-card (and hCard).

Using a microformats2 parser, you can get a canonical JSON representation of h-card contact information.

Software Examples

Archive

Web pages prior to site death and zombification, thanks to Internet Archive:

Site Death

  • 2016-05-16 domain expired
  • 2016-07-31 https://web.archive.org/web/20160731191234/http://portablecontacts.net:80/ zombie reincarnation started with new WordPress install that eventually redirects to a t.co link (hence unlinked archive.org link).

See Also