http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/facebook-app-gmail-import/A 26-year-old coder in Chicago is jumping into the Facebook-Google war over mining Gmail contacts to find friends on Facebook. Eduardo Fernández spent the last two days creating “Gmail Contacts,” a Facebook app that navigates around the speedbumps Google laid down this week to point out that Facebook doesn’t play fairly in the information sharing economy.
The app lets you login to your Gmail account, and it finds which of your Gmail contacts are on Facebook and gives you the chance to friend the ones you haven’t connected with yet.
The drawbacks? It doesn’t use Google’s API, so you have to take Fernández at his word that the app doesn’t remember your password. And two, due to the load on his server, the app only checks fifty at a time. If you want to go through a long list of contacts, you have to run it multiple times.
Fernández says he got interested in the battle since his six-month old company Improffice specializes in helping businesses migrate information from normal Gmail accounts to Google App accounts, and from Google App accounts to Google App accounts.
“This has been a fun two-day project and I hope I don’t get into trouble with Google and Facebook,” Fernández told Wired.com.
If the application proves popular with Facebookers who don’t care for the new hassle it takes to check your Gmail contacts for new Facebook friends, Fernandez says he’ll increase the server capacity to remove the 50 name limitation.
And more importantly, he says he will integrate the app with a another Google API so that your password is sent to Google, not his server.
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source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/facebook-app-gmail-import/
