Open Source Contact Importer/Inviter
Posted by: admin in Blogging, CMS, Open Source Tags=Have you ever been on a social networking site, let’s say Facebook for example, and it gave you an option to invite all your friends from your gmail or yahoo email account? You ever wondered how you would build something like that on your own social site? Maybe on your blog or maybe your own social network? OpenInviter is an open source php class written in PHP5 that does just that. It allows users to import contacts from most of the well known email providers and social networks.
Right now OpenInviter currently supports these providers:
- Gmail
- Windows Live
- Yahoo
- Mail.com
- Friendster
- hi5
- Myspace & more..
And here’s the great part for many of you readers out there. There is already integration support for Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla!!! Check it out and download it and start using it! Why not? Especially if you have a Wordpress or Drupal blog and want to try and build a community around your blog. Makes sense. Use this link because WebmasterResources has direct links at the bottom of his article for a demo and download page.
Entries (RSS)
November 21st, 2008 at 9:17 am
This is a horrible idea, and I hope it never catches on (any more than it already has, anyway). I for one will never give up my usernames and passwords to systems like this.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:31 pm
I did some research and this whole thing looks extremely sketchy. They are billing themselves as “Open Source” but there isn’t a license to be found anywhere in the code or on their site. The only thing that is really open about this that you can see the code and report bugs. There’s no code repository or anything. You need to give over the details of your first born to signup for the service. The demo doesn’t work. All data is passed over http, not https. And most alarming of all, if you turn remote debugging on, and there is an error after the contacts have been retreived, all that contact data is sent back to http://debug.openinviter.com/debug/remote_debugger.php. Yikes!
Furthermore the Drupal module isn’t really an API that you could integrate with your other Drupal modules, it is a black box that you can use to send a static message (”You are invited to http://example.com“) to your contacts.
The Drupal module space doesn’t need any more half-assed modules like this. If they can manage to get these issues sorted out then the way to go would be to instead develop an import engine for Contact Importer
November 21st, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Oh and the grammar of the user-exposed text is appalling. Not suitable for any site that requires the slightest bit of polish or professionality.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:21 pm
thanks dallin for looking into this more and finding out some more info about it! They brought it to my attention so I thought it would be cool! But if what you are saying is true, it’s not really an open source project. Looks like we might be dealing with another situation of someone trying to profit off the term “open source”. I plan on looking into this some more.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I agree, the whole concept is a horrible idea. It encourages people to misunderstand personal security.
But the problem is only going to get worse until the big email providers implement real tools to do this sort of thing. The most promising technology in this area is probably OAuth which is a sister to OpenID. But currently none of the big providers are making any real efforts in this regard. It may take a big security breach to get change to happen (i.e. some site uses one of these email username/pass forms to harvest millions of emails for nefarious uses).
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:03 am
Thank you for your opinion Dalin.
(yup, we are using it, that’s why we are developing it)
We are hurrying into adding more services lately that we forgot that we are not the only ones using OI
IT IS open source. A GPL agreement will be added to the package.
The reason of registering is because we want to offer auto updates later on (based on that little api string)
The debug feature (which comes disabled) has been required by our members.
December 10th, 2008 at 12:08 am
No matter what you say openinviter, but it’s proven fact, you are stealing others contact information and password even , you guys are unethical and will be banned soon.
December 17th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Are you sure they are stealing others contact information and passwords?
December 17th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Like OpenInviter said, remote debugging is disabbled by default. So no they are probably not “stealing” paswords. But the potential for a privacy breach is there.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:08 am
OpenInviter is cool. That debug feature is disabled and you can even delete it entirely if you wish. But the script is really cool.