Import Hotmail contacts "the right way" ?

Question

I have a website where I want to allow the users to invite their friends, by getting their contacts in hotmail/msn.

Google has the google contacts API for these purposes, does MSN publish a similar javascript API?

Please note that I do not want to ask the user for their username/password like http://openinviter.com/ .

Also, if anyone can provide some tutorials / examples I would appreciate it, as Microsoft docs are usually hard to understand :)

Answer 1

Check out http://www.cloudsponge.com. Uses the Contact API's available from the sources to aggregate into a single API integration with your site. Import contacts from Yahoo, Gmail, Windows Live (MSN & Hotmail), AOL, Plaxo, Microsoft Outlook, and Apple Address Book. Includes libraries for JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby.

Answer 2

I have used Cloudsponge, and it works great, and is pretty reasonably priced.

Answer 3

you can use this component with .Net, c# and VB.. http://www.socialcontactsimporter.net Worked on our web site like a dream and works with all the major providers, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Outlook Express, Firefox and so on..

We tried a number of ways even creating our own but was no good because the email providers (hotmail etc,) kept on changing their web sites making our code break.. Dont waist your time. Life is too short.

They also do hourly testing to make sure it works.