How many applications ask for your Google username and password to get access to your contacts? A lot of new services offer the “feature” to map contacts on their service to your buddies. For example, you signup to Dopplr and want to map your contacts over.

Giving your username and password to your email is a Bad Thing ™, so we have wanted to put out an API that does what you really want (access to contacts) without opening up the entire farm (e.g. look at your email, or worse).

Sebastian Kanthak and his team have released the Google Contacts API:

It gives programmatic access to your contact list. The contact list is shared among Google applications like Gmail, Reader, Calendar, and more.

The Google Contacts Data API allows you to own your own contact data. We expect the API to be useful for a big range of applications. For example, developers can use it to:

• Import a user’s Google contacts into their web or desktop application
• Export their application’s contact list to Google
• Write sync applications for mobile devices or popular, desktop-based contact management applications

The Contacts API allows developers to create, read, update, and delete contacts using the Google Data protocol, based on AtomPub. It also allows for incremental sync by supporting the “updated-min” and “showdeleted” parameters. Please take a look at our documentation to see all the options supported.

We know that this Google Data API is the most requested feed by our developer community, so we’re very excited about this release. We are committed to actively work with you to improve the Google Contacts Data API and we’d like to hear back from you in our Google Contacts API group.

I know many people have been waiting for this, and I am excited. What a day for tech!