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CF Needs An Open Source Contact List Importer

Posted At : June 30, 2008 11:50 AM | Posted By : todd sharp
Related Categories: ColdFusion

What do I mean by contact list importer? Well, join any 'social network' nowadays and you'll likely be presented with a utility to allow you to invite your friends to that network by importing your contact list from GMail, Yahoo Mail, etc. These utilities are pretty nice, but if you think about it the code behind them is pretty powerful. Essentially you need a mechanism to speak to each individual web mail clients API to authenticate and retrieve the user's contacts, then grok each individual response based on the API to normalize the contact data.

There are paid software products available that do this (for example this one from Octazen Solutions) but I say there is no reason we can't build a comparable open source product. I emphasize 'we' becuase I simply don't have the time to research the API for every client and bang out the necessary code to make all them work. On top of that, I don't have an account with most of them, so I'd have to take them time to sign up for each service too.

So here is my suggestion. We, as a community, work on this project. I've already started it - I've got a simple GMail importer built that does the trick. I think we'd need to come up with a standard return format and then have a handful of folks willing to contribute code for the individual API's out there. Do folks think this would be useful, and if so are you willing to contribute?

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Todd, that does sound like a worthwhile endeavor but just like you, my time is limited. If I were to contribute anything, it would have been a gMail interface.

It looks like this project provides a way to authenticate with Yahoo: http://yahoobbauth.riaforge.org/ so in theory it wouldn't be too hard to extend that to then export contact information.

Good luck with your attempt to start a group effort, though!

# Posted By Adam Tuttle | 6/30/08 12:18 PM

The list supported by Octazen is huge, its going to take a while to match all of that...Gmail and Yahoo are the easier ones but not sure even all of the others even have a public facing API?

But its worth the effort I think. I would be ready to help out in my rarely available spare time.

# Posted By Anuj Gakhar | 6/30/08 12:35 PM

Count me in!

Create a project in google code... we join... we take an implementation. basically do it like an ORM :)

MD

# Posted By Mark Drew | 6/30/08 12:37 PM

I want to join this too.

# Posted By Raul Riera | 6/30/08 12:50 PM

As a starter for 10, here are a few of the API's I easily found this morning. Most people use REST by the looks of things so that should be pretty easy. Of course, I think we should have a service factory and each service should implement the same interface.

Here are some of API's:

http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/developers_gu...

http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463979.a...

http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v...

http://www.bebo.com/docs/api/Default.jsp

# Posted By Mark Drew | 7/1/08 4:02 AM

I would love to help out but I'm swamped - if you get desperate give me a nudge. Also check out: http://svetlozar.net/page/Import-Contacts-from-Gma...

# Posted By Nick Tong | 7/1/08 11:50 AM

I see why you all think this is a good idea, but the very concept still creeps me out. I'll admit I have used the importer on sites like LinkedIn, but users should never have to give out their passwords to any third party, EVER - and training them to do so is bad security. The fact that this is seen as the solution to the multiple social networks problem is a failure in the way we're building them, I think.

Hopefully projects like Open Social, OAuth and OpenID will eventually lead to an alternative solution to giving out your passwords.

# Posted By Kay Smoljak | 7/1/08 11:10 PM

You want creeped out? I was testing bebo.com's implementation yesterday and they merrily passed my gmail password in plain text through the URL to the next page...maybe I'm weird but that creeped me out.

Bottom line is, obviously many folks don't mind much about giving out their passwords since so many (even you) have done it. Yahoo must agree with you because their BBAuth method requires a redirection to Yahoo's site to authenticate which then returns the user to your site with an auth token.

# Posted By todd sharp | 7/2/08 12:17 PM

Heh, the fact that sites DO it doesn't mean they SHOULD. To us it's ok, but to a non-tech-savvy user the difference between entering their email password into some hot new networking site and a phishing site is less clear. We tell users that for their own security they should NEVER give out their password to anyone... oh, except Facebook and LinkedIn and <insert social network site here>....

# Posted By Kay Smoljak | 7/2/08 11:34 PM

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