Ask YC: Widget for allowing visitors to import Gmail Address Book? | Hacker News Reader

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

8 pointsbreck15 comments

I bet someone out there could answer this:

This is to increase the viral marketing of a few sites. A great feature would allow users to enter their Gmail username & 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.

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.

I have tried two PHP classes from SF--grabber and contact grabber--and neither of them worked(it appears they are out of date with the email providers).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.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

If you're willing to use a hosted solution: http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget

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

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.

Nearly every social networking site and new web 2.0 site has this feature. Passwords are not stored. I rarely feel comfortable using these features because many sites try hard to trick you into inviting everyone in your address book(BluBet as a recent example). That's precisely why this widget would be useful--having a trusted company provide this functionality for many small sites would be preferable to trusting many small sites with these credentials.

I agree. I think the whole idea is absolutely horrible. It'd be better to have webmail clients have a "Email my contact list to this address" functionality.

I don't understand your concerns. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Loopt, Flickr, practically every single site with any type of social component implements this idea. What's the problem?

Ubiquitous implementation does not mean it's a good idea.

It encourages people to give sites login details to other sites. That is a really bad idea, especially when it's only to import your contacts.

Would you give someone the keys to your house so they could rifle through your letters, address book, computer etc to find your contacts?

A far better solution would be a push from the user - email the website a list of contacts for example.

A far better solution would be a push from the user - email the website a list of contacts for example.

I disagree. The implementations I have seen are very easy to use and effective. This solves a huge problem of having to build a friends list from scratch every time I join a new site. Emailing a list of contacts would be a feature no one would ever use.

The security concerns are warranted. I wouldn't give out my credentials to just anyone, only to reputable sites. If a site were to abuse a user's trust by using the email login info for unathorized purposes, a user who was actively and willingly trying to help the site by inviting their friends, I think the consequences should be and would be severe.

As long as one uses common sense in deciding whether to give out their login info, I think this is a really good idea.

Ideally, a trusted third party--or the email providers themselves--would handle this type of contacts exchange through some type of JavaScript tool.

By "email the website a list of contacts" I mean have webmail clients implement a button [Email my contacts] so the user only has to login to their webmail, click the button, enter an email address for the site.

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.

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.

Thanks! Look forward to the launch.

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

Octazen.com

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