Gravatars to Google Contacts Importer

I really like avatars and therefore I’m a big fan of Gravatar. When Google first released their Contacts API, the first thing I though of was creating a small application to sync my friend’s Gravatars to my Google Contacts addressbook. The problem was that the first version of the API didn’t have an option to manage the photos of the contacts. Few months later, Google updated the API to include the option to update the contact’s photos. I played a bit with the new API, but never had the time to write the appliaction.

Yesterday  (October 11 2008), the guys from Automattic/Gravatar wrote a post the summarizes their last year. This reminded me of this small project that I always wanted to code. I’ve decidced to code a first release of the application and put the code on Google Code for other to contribute.

Gravatars to Google Contacts Importer 

I’v decided to make it a .NET application and not a Python script, to address more people (I guess that more people are comfortable with running application than Python scripts). The reason that this isn’t a webapp, is because it takes a whole lot of time to process each contact list. If there was an option to question the Gravatar API for existence of a Gravatar for each email, it would make everything a bit quicker.

It’s .NET 2.0, so I guess there shouldn’t be a problem to run it on Linux using Mono, although I didn’t try that. The code is very simple, so if someone wants to translate it to other languages it’s possible and shouldn’t take too much time.

This is an alpha version, therefore don’t be scared if a nasty exception jumps at you :-) There are a lot of things to imporve, like adding threads to speed up things, time left counter and more. When I will have some more free time, I might add all this.

This is my first opensource project and your comments are mostly appreciated. 

Arik

  • http://www.technospot.net/blogs/about-ashish-mohta/ Ashish Mohta

    Hmm Not sure but where is the download link ? I dont see the it. Sorry if I missed it somehow

  • http://ottodestruct.com Otto

    It doesn’t work at all, just says “something unpredictable happened”.

    Are you assuming a gmail.com address or something? You might consider making it work with Google Apps accounts too.

  • http://www.technospot.net/blogs/about-ashish-mohta/ Ashish Mohta

    @Otto Doesn’t work with @Gmail.com either. However the authentication works as I get Wrong username password error when i dont give the right password

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  • http://www.technospot.net/blogs/about-ashish-mohta/ Ashish Mohta

    The bug is gone. I made a post on it and linked back to you. Will mail you.

  • Dan

    Very useful. Thanks!

  • http://15december.org Shawn

    Any testing of over 1000 contacts? I have 1300 and the app crashes for me every time shortly after starting to process.

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  • http://simianuprising.com jeremyclarke

    To bad it’s not mac-compatible. I’ll try it with my test XP in VirtualBox.

    About querying gravatar.com for the existence of an icon (i.e. avoiding the default image problem), I worked out a way to figure it out based on the http headers. You fetch the headers from the file (in my case this was during php execution) and check for a property called ‘content-disposition’. From what I’ve seen all default gravatars don’t have this property, while real avatars do have a vlue for it.

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  • 4j1e

    saya bingung mau pakai gravatar yang mana yang bagus

  • http://www.arikfr.com/blog/ Arik Fraimovich

    I'm sorry, but I don't understand – can you write again in English?

  • Robertobastia

    Vorrei revistrarmi su messeger

  • wxzbb

    Hmm, good solution. Well i'll translate this article into Chinese later on my blog.

  • http://www.arikfr.com/blog/ Arik Fraimovich

    Thanks, but please note that:
    1. it didn't work for some people (probably something to do with a
    combination of .NET version and OS version).
    2. I switched to Mac, so I no longer maintain it…

  • wxzbb

    Well, all my friends like the translation of this article, and thx again for this perfect solution!

  • http://www.arikfr.com/blog/ Arik Fraimovich

    Glad to hear that ! :) Thank you for the translation.

  • Pingback: 将Google Contacts中的联系人头像批量同步为Gravatar头像 | 谷奥——探寻谷歌的奥秘

  • Pingback: 将Google Contacts中的联系人头像批量同步为Gravatar头像 | 谷奥——探寻谷歌的奥秘

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    http://www.staffingpower.com

  • staffing1

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  • http://www.staffingpower.com/ staffing1

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    http://www.staffingpower.com

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