Anyone out there know how the friend invites used by most social networking applications are programmed? You know the ones – you provide your e-mail login credentials for one of Google, Yahoo, MSN, or AOL, and the service pulls in your contact list and lets you choose which ones you e-mail. A bit ridiculous – do I really want to trust some random webapp with my e-mail password, which is stronger than the ones I use for the webapp – but hey, everybody’s doing it.
I’d like to know whether this is done by screenscraping or an API, and if there’s any good publicly-available code for this – stuff I can (and eventually will) look up on my own if none of you guys know.
UPDATE: It’s official, my readers rock! Thanks, guys.
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LazyPaul would just go for the Plaxo widget that will do this for you without the heavy lifting
http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget/
Most are basic screen scrapers where you actually get the username and password from the user and the bot just logs in via that.
Yahoo has a browser based authentication, where you authenticate on a yahoo page and the app temporarily gets access: http://developer.yahoo.com/auth/
Gmail also has some pretty rich API support around it: http://johnvey.com/features/gmailapi/docs/
There’s a few bits of code around for this – one is here: http://freshmeat.net/projects/contactgrabber/
Something else to look at is Plaxo: http://www.plaxo.com/api
I’ve actually heard some disturbing stuff about how these software services are actually outsourced… and one company (I don’t know the details myself) that’s been mentioned in this regard doing somewhat sketchy stuff is Rapleaf (http://www.rapleaf.com). Worth looking at… ?
Plaxo provides a nice API/Web service that takes care of all the code for this. It’s quite nice if you can get past using plaxo.
Contact import software is now a commodity…many offshore companies provide out-of-the-box code in multiple platforms (php,.net etc) with regular updates (as the webmail’s change often), Ex: improsys.com
I don’t think Rapleaf would be the right solution. They do have this capability into their service to allow a user to have a public page that links to all of their social networking identities. But, I don’t think they provide an api like this.
Auren Hoffman is the founder and I just chatted with him last week. He’s a good guy if you want an intro. They may be able to help you out in the future. Not exactly sure what they are planning.
Also… I think they got a bad rap about the way they handled some PR. I wouldn’t call Auren or Rapleaf shady.