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Is there a way to find out when a particular contact in my Google Contacts addressbook got created?

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This information is not traditionally exposed through the Google Contacts online interface. However! You can get access to "created" and "updates" dates and times using the Google Contacts API.

If you're not a developer, you can use the API Playground to visually walk you through making a request to the Google Contacts API to get the data you want.

  1. Go to API Playground, login to the Google account you want to fetch contact added/updated dates for, and select the dropdown for "Contacts v3", then select "Authorize APIs".

Go to API Playground and select the dropdown for "Contacts v3", then select "Authorize APIs"

  1. Click the "Exchange authorization code for tokens" button: Click the "Exchange authorization code for tokens" button

  2. Click "List possible authorizations" and select "List Contacts" Click "List possible authorizations" and select "List Contacts"

  3. Click "Send the request" and copy everything after the XML response (starting with <?xml version='1.0'...) Click "Send the request" and copy everything after the XML response (starting with <?xml version='1.0'...)

  4. Open up your favorite text editor and paste the contents in. You can now Find the dates inside of the XML file.

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  • Just add the links to the screenshots and we’ll incorporate them into the answer.
    – Alex
    Jan 18, 2013 at 5:57
  • This answer is useful and there is an updated date and app:edited, but I don't see any kind of created date in the xml results. As an aside, if you want to search for a particular contact you can put the following into the Request URI field: https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full/?q=john
    – User
    Feb 26, 2019 at 6:23
  • Update for Dec. 2021: The Contacts API URL is deprecated and does not work. The new API is the People API; the migration steps are documented here. The new endpoint to list contacts is https://people.googleapis.com/v1/people/me/connections (this is what you'll put in the Request URI text input box in step 3). This endpoint accepts query string parameters pageToken and pageSize for pagination; see documentation.
    – nishanthshanmugham
    Dec 2, 2021 at 11:05
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There is no creation-date in the output, and the updated time displayed is completely false. Though, the output can be useful (for other purpose than finding the creation date).

By default there is only 25 first results, so you can run this many times and increase start-index to have them all :

https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full?max-results=25&start-index=1&orderby=lastmodified&sortorder=descending
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I understand that this question is in the past-tense, and that the API Playground can accomplish this task for such tense, but for the current and future tense you can use IFTTT to easily copy data (including the date added) from Google Contacts to a Google Sheet. I've written an Applet here which you can use for the task. The extra benefit is that you won't have to write code to format the output of the contacts response as you would from the API Playground.

https://ifttt.com/applets/87296692d-if-new-contact-added-log-it-to-a-google-drive-spreadsheet

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