Importing a user’s address book with Plaxo

Despite sounding like a mouthwash, Plaxo is a nifty tool that can be embedded in any site to allow a user to select contacts stored in their address book on Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Hotmail and others. Plaxo interfaces to all of these sites for you so that you don’t have to write code for several different APIs. Perfect for situations where you want to offer users the ability to send emails from within your application (e.g. “recommend to a friend”, “share this page” etc).

Plaxo do some clever javascript/iframe jiggery pokery to circumvent the browser’s cross-domain restriction. The only issues that I can with this approach is that your users have to submit their username/password via plaxo (although they do promise not to store these details and the  calls back to plaxo are over https). I’ve knocked together a quick demo.