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And therein lies the problem. OAuth is a great idea, but how do you convince Joe Shmoe that it’s worth him figuring out? Geeks will flock to OAuth inevitably after hearing about it, but they aren’t really the folks who need this. They know better than to give out info like this; Granny Jones doesn’t.

“But I think we are going in this direction anyway with things like DiSo et. al. It’s mostly a question of adoption.”
QFT

For the short term I see the best solution here to use OAuth, Google would need to step forward and enable getting your addressbook via OAuth. Having then libraries for PHP, Ruby, Python etc. for this would IMHO help quite a bit here.

OpenID is not really needed in this step I think but of course it would be great if this could be added in the same step and maybe make it automatable even more.

On the long run I’d like to see little reason to login anywhere to fetch all my contacts from x different places. I would want one place (which I choose) where my contacts are stored. When I login to some new service it should automatically discover these with me just deciding which should be transferred (maybe group based).

But I think we are going in this direction anyway with things like DiSo et. al. It’s mostly a question of adoption.

Geni doesn’t actually store the external passwords you enter after it retrieves the contacts, so if Geni was to ever be compromised, the thieves would not be able to get anything other than the e-mails addresses themselves, not the passwords or e-mail messages.

They side-stepped the issue, ignoring the potential of the web services abusing the information itself. Not to mention the lil’ phishy training that users internalize in the process.

First, I’m not giving my password to a random social networking site.

Second, I’ll invite the contacts that I want to invite to a particular service. Yes, it may save time to import, but I don’t need a bot to send friend invites for me.

I’d consider it with your idea of basing it on OpenID, etc. where I might have a little more control over the process along with better security.

Anything that wants to compete with the current way needs to keep it *as simple* as the current way from the user’s point of view.