The short of this story: the Invite Friends module on Bemba.com gave a ‘permission denied’ for the better part of the first day after launch. But it was fixed really quickly. Read on for more thoughts about this (hairy!) subject.

I have blogged about this subject before (Importing contacts with Ruby) and I am sure this is not the last post either. Importing contacts can be done in so many ways it’s not even funny. My first quick and dirty implementation was the Plaxo popup. It’s actually a good importer, but users are in effect leaving Bemba and business-wise we didn’t like that. Also, SSL is not possible.

After various other solutions we eventually ended up using the importer from Octazen. (note: the Ruby gem listed in my earlier post is quite good, but not complete yet. The one from Octazen is).

Integration of the tool into our Rails app was a breeze, literally minutes.

In fact, the reason that our import contacts page was showing ‘permission denied’ today was caused by the fact that I completely forgot about this project after the initial implementation! Everything worked right away and the page was left only open to administrators, like all new features. I simply forgot to open it up to everyone else.

Now that it’s open I invite everyone to try it out for themselves. We only show your contacts, we do not email them unless you explicitly set a checkbox and then press submit, so go right ahead! Drop a comment here if your webmail provider is missing - I will try to request an importer.