Google Contacts API released: contacts about to become more useful

If you're connecting to Microsoft Exchange now (or in June with your iPhone), you won't be affected by this next bit o' news. The rest of us however, could us a little more data portability from all of that Gmailing. Wouldn't it be nice to use that contact data, for example? Google seems to think so and they've released their Google Contacts API to help us along. Granted, they didn't announce any new Contact client or service; we'll have to wait for the programmer types to whip up some Contact apps for us. Let's just hope they don't get consumed by the iPhone SDK and forget about the needs of the many. So say we all.