It was super useful when building viral applications because you didn't have to do the hard work to integrate with all the major email providers including Gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc. They supported around 100 providers. It was crazy good.

I was really into building viral apps back then - ended up making one that went huge. Feedjit. And got funded for it. We grew to over a million sites using our little live traffic feed. What was exciting about email virality back then is the short viral cycle time - meaning that if email contacts list import is your viral mechanism, then when a new user joins, the time they take to recruit more users is measured in minutes, rather than e.g. weeks when it comes to other viral mechanisms.

Facebook's rapid growth back in the day was largely due to this email contacts list import mechanism. They got very good at it, and before they achieved unstoppable global dominance, they were paranoid that others would use the same tactic. So much so that they bought this group of folks out in SE Asia to take them off the board, so that other devs could not build a Facebook competitor without having to hand-implement all the integration work that these guys did.

Every now and then I'll think about this group of devs, how FB took them out of play, and what an enabler they were and could have continued to be for other viral PHP applications.

But I can never find them. I've forgotten the name of the lib and the company or group that made it. I'd love to do some digging around this story on archive.org and so on. If anyone can remember the name of this lib or the group that was acquired, I'd very much appreciate it. You can post here, or email me at mark at defiant.com.

Thanks!!

Mark Maunder.