Soocial Enters the “Deep End of the Data Portability Pool” « The Real McCrea

What do I mean by that? Automated, multi-way addess book sync is the Holy Grail of data portability. When it works flawlessly, it is damn-near magic. Make a change in any one tool, and it automatically shows up in all the others. Your hard drive crashes? Not a problem; there’s a copy in the cloud. But behind this “magic” is some of the hardest work in the software business. Why? Rock solid APIs are few and far between for the various tools, and in the absence of such APIs, any company that wants to do sync has to jump through a bunch of technical hoops to make sync work at all. Oh, and if in jumping through such hoops, something goes a little bit wrong? There is Hell to pay. Sync is an unforgiving master. Mess up a person’s address book (in all the tools they use), and you may lose that customer forever.