It's only been a few weeks since we released our Address Book Access web widget, but already a number of prominent sites have started using it, including YouTube, Zazzle, and others. If you haven't seen it yet, this widget lets any site easily auto-import a user's existing address book, including from Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail, Outlook, and Plaxo. Potential uses include letting your users send links or invitations to their friends (without having to remember and type in all their email addresses), seeing who you know that's already using a given service (e.g. finding friends on Flickr or Netflix), hopefully lots of uses we haven't anticipated!
In talking with current and potential partners, the one thing everyone tells us is "we want our users to have access to their current address book, but we really don't want to build--yet alone maintain--import code for all these different sites". We recently experienced a good example of why people feel this way: a couple of weeks ago, Gmail changed the charset encoding they used when exporting contacts, which broke the existing import code. Luckily, our monitoring tools picked this up right away, and once we figured out what had changed we were able to quickly build and release a fixed version. We have to do this kind of thing for a living anyway, but you certainly shouldn't have to go through that yourself! That's the idea behind the widget. :)
If you've added the widget to your site (or if you've used our sync API), please drop us a line. We're building a gallery of Plaxo-enabled sites and services, and we'd love to show off what you've done.
--Joseph Smarr, Lead Developer, Address Book Access Widget
I've more or less been doing nothing to speak of. I've just been staying at home waiting for something to happen. Today was a loss. My life's been really bland today, but so it goes.