Creating a simple web applications or sophisticated social network often come to the point when we want to let our users to access their third party email applications (contact book to be more specific gmail, msn, yahoo etc..).
Unfortunately we couldn't find any stable drupal module for contact importing. Most of them are just draft of modules which haven't had enough time to make it to beta version.
(Writing importers for individual services often requires usage of cURL library becuse most of email service providers do not provide any API - this is why all cURL importers requires continuous monitoring and updating).
We decided to create our own solution, which will integrate with invite.module and use XML-RPC protocol to access our updated importers.
This approach will provide always up-to-date version of the importers to the end users as well as allow most people without cURL enabled hosting to provide such functionality on their sites.