we’re all gearing up for an ultra-portable internet where your data is not locked up in silos, but as free and careless as ringo starr. until that day comes along, coders will continue to scrape addressbooks, unsexy 2007 stylee.

until two weeks ago, the best way of doing this in ruby was the contacts gem. the new kid on the block is the blackbook gem. it’s based on mechanize and hpricot, and comes with yahoo, gmail, hotmail, and aol scrapers ready to go. it’s much nicer than contacts, and pretty much exacly what we had in mind when we developed thief. we won’t continue developing thief, as blackbook is perfectly good for the job. instead, we’ll port the gmx, web.de and freenet providers back to blackbook