The Wishlist Blog

I just wanted to take a moment and voice my appreciation for Plaxo’s address book JavaScript widget. I use the widget on your-wishlist.com to enable members to send their wishlists to friends and family members.

Plaxo’s widget is basically a standalone JavaScript applet that takes the work out of retrieving contacts from other, proprietary locations. Ever had your project manager come up to you and say, “Hey! This website we’re working on – we’d really like to be able to retrieve email addresses from AOL Instant Messenger, from Yahoo Webmail, and from Gmail, and add those contacts to our system.” That’s what Plaxo’s widget does: you don’t need to worry about getting data from these various services (included are Gmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, MSN and Outlook) – Plaxo will do it for you, in its own popup window. It takes care of querying and parsing, and passes the contacts back to your website and scripts in the form of simple JavaScript objects.

You can investigate it for yourself, here

Seriously, adding this functionality to the “Share a wishlist” section of your-wishlist.com took less than 15 minutes. I’m very impressed.