What's the easiest way to let people add friends from Facebook, Gmail, etc?

Question

1. Rather than just grabbing the user's friends' emails, I want to show their list of friends with profile pic, etc in my app.
2. Is there a "widget" (JS and HTML) way of doing this, rather than going to the trouble of coding everything yourself using Facebook, Gmail, etc libraries for your server-side language?

Answer 1

In the case of facebook, it is quite easy. You can get almost everything by just copying and pasting javascript code. Their service is called "Facebook Connect" and is perfectly documented here: http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php

Take a few minutes to read through the Facebook Connect pages and you will learn quickly!