If you’ve spent any amount of time on social networking web sites, you’ve probably experienced a moment like this:
Hey, this site is pretty cool. Invite my friends? Okay. I know that my buddy Jimmy Pop will dig it, for sure. Let’s see, just enter your e-mail address. There’s the Submit button — Wait a second! Did I just spam everyone in my GMail???
Whether by accident or by design, many social networking sites have a confusing way of getting people to invite other people into the system. As we’ve been working on adding Contacts — other customers in the Get Satisfaction system who you may want to follow or refer to on a regular basis — we’ve made it our goal to avoid the pitfalls that many other sites have fallen into. We want to make sure you know what each “next step” in an invite process will be before you click that button.
So, give it a shot. Add some Contacts from your dashboard.
Tip: If you’re a Twitter or Flickr member, start by importing those. It’s lickety-split fast.
Feedback: We think we’ve gotten pretty close to what we envisioned when we started designing this new feature, but if you have any advice, kudos, or complaints, share them with us.
All posts
2 Comments
Ah no, don’t tell me you’re screenscraping :(
For Windows Live (Hotmail) there is a thing called the Contacts API, you can find more on http://dev.live.com/contacts.
There are some examples there, I’ve made my own example in PHP, which can be found at http://happyfrog.alex-media-services.com.
As far as I know, Google is also offering such a API, I’m not sure about Yahoo! though.
But please switch to a Contacts API a.s.a.p. as screenscraping is not the way to go.
Alex,
I have seen the live Contacts API, and we’ll probably switch to it when we do another round of dev on the contacts import. I chose to include the hotmail import using screenscraping rather than not including it at all. The Contacts API is still in beta, but more importantly, the cost of developing the code to support the API is much more than simply using one of the many currently available open source libraries to screen scrape.