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.
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
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[…] talked enough, Arik has written a small program which allows you to sync your Google contacts with their Gravatars. You will .net framework to be installed on your computer to use this. Here are the screen shots […]
[…] you on various social media services, blog comments, forum posts, and even in Google’s Gmail contacts. Gravatars link to your email address, so when you interact on a site using Gravatars, it pulls in […]
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Hmm Not sure but where is the download link ? I dont see the it. Sorry if I missed it somehow
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.
@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
The bug is gone. I made a post on it and linked back to you. Will mail you.
Very useful. Thanks!
Any testing of over 1000 contacts? I have 1300 and the app crashes for me every time shortly after starting to process.