What's the easiest way to let people add friends from Facebook, Gmail, etc?

Question

1. Rather than just grabbing the user's friends' emails, I want to show their list of friends with profile pic, etc in my app.
2. Is there a "widget" (JS and HTML) way of doing this, rather than going to the trouble of coding everything yourself using Facebook, Gmail, etc libraries for your server-side language?

Answer 1

Well considering that the JS you're imagining would require your app key / secret to even work, your site would have to be authenticated with Facebook Connect (login/logout/sessions), plus some code to DO something with the form data when you submit whichever friends were selected, I would assume no.

It really is not that hard to do what you've described by rolling your own. There are plenty of examples on how to use Facebook Connect on the web.

Answer 2

You'll still have to perform the Facebook FQL queries to get the user's friends. For the actual connection to a social network, you can take a look at [Open RPX] https://rpxnow.com/how_it_works

It allows you to create an OpenID based registration pretty quickly. Facebook doesn't use OpenID but I think RPX allows users to log in using that too. Worth a look.

Answer 3

Another option (although pay for option) is pluck. www.pluck.com. They specialise in integrating websites into social media. I don't work for them so this isn't a biased plug but a user can basically log into your site using their facebook id and bingo image is there and you can post to facebook, syndicate content etc etc from within your site. Just a thought anyway. An example is http://www.livestrong.com/.

Answer 4

In the case of facebook, it is quite easy. You can get almost everything by just copying and pasting javascript code. Their service is called "Facebook Connect" and is perfectly documented here: http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php

Take a few minutes to read through the Facebook Connect pages and you will learn quickly!

Answer 5

I believe you can just import/find them on facebook if they have their e-mail in the info section of their page.