Remember the days when managing your contacts felt a bit like rummaging through an old Rolodex? Well, Google has been busy behind the scenes, and if you've been trying to update your contacts recently, you might have noticed things have shifted. The old Contacts API, the one many apps and services used to talk to your Google contacts, officially retired back in January 2022.
Now, before you panic, this isn't a story about losing anything important. It's more of a friendly guide to help you understand the new landscape, which is powered by the People API. Think of it as an upgrade – everything the old API could do is still there, and then some, but with a few key differences and a new way of doing things.
One of the biggest changes revolves around what Google calls 'Other Contacts.' These are those folks who aren't explicitly in your main contact list but have interacted with your Google services. With the new People API, administrators have read-only access to these. If you're looking to actually change details for someone in 'Other Contacts,' you'll need to add them to your 'My Contacts' first. The API can still pull basic info like names, emails, and phone numbers from 'Other Contacts,' but for any real editing, they need to be officially part of your main address book.
This transition also means a refresh of how access is granted. The old, broad scope like https://www.google.com/m8/feeds has been replaced by more specific ones. For accessing your personal contacts, you'll now use https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts. If you're interested in directory information, like company-wide contacts, that falls under https://www.googleapis.com/auth/directory.readonly.
Let's talk about what you can actually do with your contacts. For your personal contacts, the People API offers robust capabilities. You can read individual contacts, get batches of them, or list all your connections. When it comes to making changes – creating new contacts, updating existing ones, or even deleting them – you'll use endpoints like people.createContact, people.updateContact, and people.deleteContact. Even updating a contact's photo has its own dedicated methods: people.updateContactPhoto and people.deleteContactPhoto. All of these require the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts scope.
For those 'Other Contacts' we mentioned, remember they're primarily for reading. The scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.other.readonly is your key here. But, if you decide you want to bring one of these into your main contact list and manage them fully, there's a handy function called otherContacts.copyOtherContactToMyContactsGroup.
And what about contact groups? The People API handles these too. You can get, list, create, update, and delete groups, as well as manage who belongs in them. It’s all about making your contact management more streamlined and secure.
It might sound like a lot of technical jargon, but at its heart, this is about making your digital address book work better for you. The shift to the People API is designed to offer more control and flexibility, ensuring your contact information is managed efficiently and securely. So, while the old way is gone, the new way is built to be even more powerful.
