Contentfree

Blackbook automates the nitty-gritty of importing contacts from various services and files and exporting them as VCard, XML, or simple Hash. Utilize those contacts from services like AOL, GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or CSV to help your social networking site become GIGANTIC overnight! You’ll be able to get big and sell for millions before anyone figures out it’s just like every other social network.

Installation

sudo gem install blackbook

Examples

An example of fetching Gmail contacts – by default, returns an array of hashes with :name and :email

contacts = Blackbook.get :username => 'me@gmail.com', :password => 'whatever'

... or returning XML

contacts = Blackbook.get :username => 'me@gmail.com', :password => 'whatever', :as => :xml

... or importing from a CSV file

contacts = Blackbook.get :csv, :file => #<File:/path/to/file.csv>

Requirements

Mechanize and its dependencies, for interacting with online providers Fastercsv for reading CSV, Mechanize >= 0.7.0 for page scraping

Support services and file types

Import: AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, CSV files

Export: Simple hash (default), Vcard, XML

Thanks

Big thanks to Mike Mondragon who helped create Blackbook (and originally got it out in the public). He has a great blog post about Blackbook, too.

Thanks also to Marton Fabo for figuring out why Mechanize couldn‘t log in to AOL.

If you create an additional importer or exporter – or simply find a bug – please consider submitting it as a patch to the Contentfree project collection on RubyForge so the community can all benefit from your hard work and ingenuity.