There's been a fair amount of discussion recently about the idea of portable social networking - that when you sign up to a new site, it should be really easy to pull your contacts and so on from whatever you've used before. Various people are attacking this problem, in various ways - in June, at Hack Day, I took the external route of writing a library you can use to pull down all your contact lists from different social networks, merge them, and list the results. It wasn't very pretty, and was really a demonstration of what could be done more than anything else.
Since then, a couple of people have expressed interest in it; either because they want to use it directly, or because they want to check how other people have tackled this problem before writing their own. You can download the python source code: psnlib.
I'm lazy at the best of times, so there:
- isn't an autoloader for the social network-specific plugins (it's about five lines of python, and I have it somewhere if anyone really wants)
- are unit tests (because it was quicker to write that way; however some of them have hard-coded specifics like who the first contact in my flickr list is)
- are my API keys, allocated for Hack Day, still in the source
There's probably some other stuff wrong as well; but you might find it useful nonetheless.