

Ask YC: Widget for allowing visitors to import Gmail Address Book? - breck

I bet someone out there could answer this:<p>This is to increase the viral marketing of a few sites. A great feature would allow users to enter their Gmail username &#38; password and then email their address books a message to visit our site. It would also work for Yahoo accounts, AOL, etc. Very common to see on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. I only want it to allow bulk sending of emails though--there is no membership to the current site in question.<p>Ideally I'd just like to plop a free javascript widget onto the sites. We did that with AddThis, and not only was it completely painless, but it has been effective too.<p>I have tried two PHP classes from SF--grabber and contact grabber--and neither of them worked(it appears they are out of date with the email providers). I've found some paid products but hope there's a free service a la AddThis that can provide this type of functionality.<p>Any ideas?<p>Thanks.
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drm237
If you're willing to use a hosted solution: <http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget>

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breck
Thanks! This is just the type of solution I was looking for.

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pierrefar
What about security? Why should we as users trust a non-Gmail service with our
Google Accounts username and password? We, as hackers, should not foster such
bad security behaviours.

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drm237
Until recently, google didn't provide an api to access contact information, so
collecting the username and password information was required to make it work.
I haven't seen any sites make use of google's new contact access api though.

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spazmaster
Soocial has a working service (still private beta though) that uses Google
Contact API.

They use OAuth authentication too, which means that you can grant access via
GMail, so you never have to give out your password to a third party (Soocial
in this case).

<http://www.soocial.com>

This widget is a terrible idea (you don't give the PIN code of your ATM card
to your waitress do you?), but might be a great idea when implemented using
OAuth.

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breck
Thanks! Look forward to the launch.

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timcederman
rapleaf have a free API, but they will create an account for each email
address that passes through it.

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markm
Octazen.com

