Startup guru Guy Kawasaki is famous for his top-ten lists of do's and don'ts for aspiring companies and entrepreneurs. His latest is "The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption". They're all good suggestions, but #8 caught my eye in particular:

#8. Requirement to re-type email addresses. How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping, VC-funded Web 2.0 company that wants to you to share content but requires you to re-type the email addresses of your friends?

I have 7,703 email addresses in Entourage. I am not going to re-type them into the piece-of-shiitake, done-as-an-afterthought address book that companies build into their products. If nothing else, companies can use this cool tool from Plaxo or allow text imports into the aforementioned crappy address book. When do you suppose a standard format will emerge for transferring contacts?

Guy, you totally nailed it, and this is exactly why we created that widget. As I mentioned at MashupCamp, nearly every web site can benefit by giving ther users access to their address book info, but doing a good job is a hard problem that's not core to most of them. A situation like that cries out for a mashup (let someone else focus on the problem, and you can just drop in the solution), and we're glad to see so many sites are doing just that! Recent widget adopters include Renkoo and MyPunchbowl, who use the widget to help their users plan social events and parties, and loopt, whose members use it to get more of their friends "on the map" (on their mobile phone).

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