finding friends in a rails app via facebook, gmail, twitter, etc...

Question

Hello,

I have built a social networking app in rails, and am looking for a simple way to allow users to login to their various other accounts (OAuth?) such as facebook, twitter, gmail, other mail clients, etc and see if their friends/contacts on those sites are signed up for my site.

Additionally I will be adding functionality to allow users to invite their non-signed up friends to my site via these same sites.

In the future I will also want to make it so that users can post their submissions on my site to these various other sites.

At this moment though, the most important feature is enabling users to see which of their contacts on these other sites are signed up for my site.

What is the best way to go about this? What gems should I be looking for (OAuth, RFacebook, Facebooker, etc).

I am currently using restful authentication (Also, can someone point me in the direction of a question that answers how to allow users to sign in, using restful authentication, using their username OR their email?)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you'll find that each service has its own API and it will be up to you to connect your application individually to each service.

Here are the API docs for Facebook, Twitter and GMail

Just Google "" API