TeamRaiser: PC2 - Address Book Import

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Casey Flinn
Casey Flinn ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 1
in Winter 2011
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  • Casey Flinn
    Casey Flinn ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1

    Q: Why does the new address book import wziard NOT support directly connecting to AOL and Hotmail like it did using the Plaxo widget?

    Regarding AOL:

    1. AOL does not offer an addressbook API that we could use to directly connect to user accounts.
    2. Plaxo was using a screen scraping technique to pull contact info out of an AOL account once logged in - which is a violation of the terms of service for AOL...in other words Plaxo was doing bad things.
    3. Because there was no API and because we will not violate another services providers terms of service, the only way we could facilitae the import of AOL contacts was to allow the system to detect a CSV file that was generated by exporting contacts from AOL

    Regarding Microsoft Hotmail:

    1. Microsoft DOES have an API that allows for the conenction to a users Hotmail address book. Actually they have two APIs. One set of APIs is old and deprecated and you will see that a lot of services using this may advertise that you can connect to Hotmail, but when you try to do it, the system will error...because the API has been deprecated. Their newer set of APIs are not freely open to anyone who wants to use them to do something like importing address books
    2. However, when we approached Microsfot to obtain permission to use their newer API, they told us that we were not eligilbe to receive permission. When asked how do we become eligible, they said that they would not disclose.
    3. Because it was clear that Microsoft was not willing to partner to expose these methods of their address book API, the only way we could support users importing addresses from Hotmail was to detect a CSV file that had been exported from Hotmail and allow the user to use the wizard to upload this CSV file.

    Bottom Line:

    A lot has changed since the world of Plaxo. New APIs, new ways email services allow people to partner with them, so while this looks like a "loss of functionality" the best way to capture these changes is that this functionality is not available from these services (Microsoft) or was never legally available to use (Plaxo).

    Questions?

    Casey Flinn

    Convio Product Management

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