Contacts: New, Experimental Firefox Addon Released By Mozilla

Mozilla released an experimental Firefox addon called "Contacts" which allows you to import Twitter and Gmail contacts (for now) and the Mac OS X address book into Firefox. This is a first step for globalization (contacts-wise):

Why is this information important? Address books and buddy lists have become an integral part of how we manage our relationships online. Your email addresses, Twitter handle and openID are used in hundreds of ways as you connect, follow and share online.

Every desktop operating system, and hundreds of web-based service providers, has some way of representing “who-you-know”. Managing all of this information can be a lot of work. There are multiple copies of your data, and they are inconsistent and disjointed.

The new Contacts Firefox extension also supports Gravatars - meaning it will scan all your contacts for images they have on Gravatar and display them in your Firefox Contacts.


Contacts will probably be integrated into Mozilla Raindrop later on, to create a powerful social client which integrates all the web services into Firefox.

Known issues:

• Gmail import requires that you have an active session with GMail.
• Twitter import requires a saved Twitter username-password pair (i.e. saved with the Firefox Password Manager, by clicking “Remember” after logging into Twitter)
• Native address book import is only implemented for MacOS 10.5 and 10.6.
• Gravatar icon import may take a long time on large address books; you may receive the “slow script” warning dialog and need to give the script permission to keep running.
• Duplicate email addresses or display names from a single service are not de-duplicated; i.e. if you have two entries for “johndoe@gmail.com” you will receive two Contact entries for them. Duplicates across services are properly de-duplicated.
• Saved permissions don’t remember the list of people, only the list of fields.
• E-mail autocompletion works on any text input named “e-mail”, “email”, or “recipients”.

Before installing, remember this is an experimental addon!

More info and installation | via Soft Libre