Importing your social network from other sites
At Dopplr, we are keenly aware that it’s a pain to re-enter your contact list into Yet Another Social Network. This week I’ve been working on ways to ease the pain. We’ve now got some pre-release features ready for testing by intrepid travellers.
If you’d like to try importing from GMail, Twitter, a local vCard file or using a contact list from a site supporting the HCard/XFN microformats, please try out these new capabilities and send us feedback. If there are systems we haven’t yet supported that would be valuable to you, let us know.
I don’t have an account on Dopplr, but i do have data in XFN format at http://steven.openid.org
[...] announced via their blog that you can now add contacts from other social network sites including gmail, twitter etc which [...]
Nice - it would be nice to have a way to check if a person I want to invite from another social network (E.g. Facebook); and if he/she is not already into my Dopplr contacts. In fact it happens to me due that most of my Facebook contacts are already listed as Dopplr ones.
The twitterimport seems to work okay though it should be better separated between already added and ‘missing’ - at the moment you have to spot the difference.
especially when you use one of the hub persons to check for interesting names on dopplr ;) as this is a mass check on if somebody is available here, i’d suggest you make this an option for me to decide if i want to pop up on such a comparison or not.
[...] Dopplr Blog » Importing your social network from other sites Dopplr makes it dead simple to bring in contacts from Gmail & Twitter. Give it a shot - it’s a cleaner experience than LinkedIn’s, which had been the example I pointed to when client’s asked for good import examples. (tags: interfacedesign dopplr) [...]
[...] network is to have to re-enter every time the list of our contacts. Looks like the guys@Dopplr are working on some import features which is a very good [...]
[...] lange währt… Dopplr kündigt eine Adressbuchsuche an: Importing your social network from other sites. Funktioniert mit vCard aber nicht mit LDIF, wie gut, dass es da das Mailtool von Jörg [...]
Great - thx - could you explain how the hCard/XFN import exactly works? If I have a XFN Source - do you follow a link within the XFN description and look up for hCards? Or are you looking only on the provided URL and search there for hCard markup?
Sebastian: Currently we do just scan for hCards on the URL you supply, and try to match them on email address from our records. Alternatively, on the Twitter import we use their hCards but because they only supply name plus username, we can only find them on Dopplr if they’ve used the same name and username with us. I’m interested in improving these heuristics, and obviously it’ll help when more people have signed up for OpenID logins on Dopplr, as these give us more concrete identity matching evidence.
Hi Matt, always good to see people making microformats useful! It would be cool if it was possible to parse microformats out of pages protected by logins, often email addresses are hidden till someone is logged in. If the site doesn’t allow HTTP Auth it’s not easy. One way you could try is using a browser rich edit control (designMode), a user can go to their page of contacts, select all, copy, and paste in to your control. This preserves all the markup and class names, at least on IE, FF and Safari 3 on windows.
[...] Dopplr Blog » Importing your social network from other sites Dopplr can now import contacts from other sites - notably Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter… but it can also import hCard from any appropriately marked-up page. Very nice! (tags: dopplr portable socialnetworking import contacts) [...]
It’s a bit old-school but I’d find FOAF import handy.
LinkedIn or Xing integration would be useful also.
As a further thought on FOAF, you ought to be able to auto-discover most people’s FOAF documents from their blogs, not sure if you keep personal urls etc yet.
I’d like to second the request for FOAF import. Obviously it’s not as popular as Other Social Networks, but people do use it…
The twitter import works great and is decent for finding hub people and just seeing who is on dopplr as Nicole points out.
It would be good if, after you decide to share trips with someone you find using the gmail looker-upper, you were returned someplace other than the gmail contact import page, perhaps back to the list of people the importer found. All in all a really useful tool. I’d love to see it work with my IM buddies lists as well, or any delimited list of email addresses or handles.
Gmail & Twitter make it more reliable can be introduced to my customers in my travel and tour company have gotten a chance locate and retrive each other . increasing group tour and easien to manage when they arrive at the same time .
I noticed that this was not an option but CSV import would be great.
I second (third?) the CSV import request…
Another thing, the user/pass form for gmail (and other?) access is not ssl protected. As there are passwords involved, it would make a lot of sense if it did.
Am I missing something?
[...] Dopplr Blog » Importing your social network from other sites terrific feature from Dopplr: worked great on my Twitter contacts. now if only they can fix the limited city selection problem. (tags: dopplr apis twitter integration interoperability via:james) [...]
[...] Dopplr: Importing your social network from other sites - Fantastic feauture. Well implemented. [...]
+1 for FOAF
Remember to treat it as RDF rather than a simple XML format otherwise valid files might be rejected - there are plenty of toolkits. If you need any help ask on #swig or #foaf on irc.freenode.net (I’m usually around as ‘danja’).
[...] be the social networking savour as opposed to glue application like FindMeOn. Well networks like Dopplr are at least having a go, as are others. This is generally good to see, any progress in making it [...]
[...] sur le blog que des outils d’import de contact avaient été mis en place. Notament l’import depuis des réseaux sociaux, et qu’ils sont entrain d’améliorer les url iCal. Vraiment bien comme ouverture [...]
I would like also to ask for FOAF support, and CVS import.
And also vCard support.
Thanks!
FOAF for Social Network Portability…
When Dopplr announced importing your social network from other sites the single most requested feature in comments was FOAF import (with CSV import being second).
So - what’s the use of FOAF for Social Network Portability?
1. Existing FOAF data
…
[...] un billet sur le blog de Dopplr à propos des nouvelles fonctionnalités pour permettre la transport… [...]
+1 for Xing
Thx for post. But I’d like to second the request for FOAF.
[...] in just one place, instead of having to maintain several separate data silos? When Dopplr announced plans to make social network imports possible, it didn’t take long for people to suggest FOAF import as a solution - and this is exactly [...]
Nice -FOAF.