OpenInviter is an open source contact importer for email providers like Mail.com, GMX.net, OperaMail, and most other popular systems. It’s basically an all-in-one address book and also includes social sites like Facebook, Friendster, and Twitter.

The script is self-hosted and meant for enterprise or server-level control as a free, open-source PHP 5 script. The script can be integrated into a site to allow for advanced tell-a-friend features other interactive and useful things.

For instance, a website visitor could create an account and integrate their contacts from the various providers (email, social networks, etc.) around the world and then promote your affiliate products or web blog (or whatever) through those networks.

For your own enterprise, this could be used as a way to integrate with your employee’s contact lists and email to consolidate all those contacts into one address book, so updating one doesn’t mean logging into a dozen others to update them as well.

The script uses WGET and cURL to handle requests and has been tested on Apache servers, but will work on most any platform that uses either. No third party gateways or API are required to run the script.

For the marketing and Web 2.0 user, this might be the perfect solution for integrating all of those contacts you’re establishing into one large list, easily and automatically. Again, OpenInviter is free and open-source and they claim it will install on any server in about five minutes. It took me longer than that to read the installation instructions, but it’s pretty straight-forward, so any competent administrator could do it in five or ten minutes.

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