Have you noticed that a lot of social sites now offer to find your contacts? It's definitely useful -- but do you trust Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter with your email address and password?! What about Fernando, SlugIt and Redface? (Okay, I made those ones up, but you get my point.)
How can I trust these new kids on the block? In short, I can't. But I trust Google. At least, they already have my login details!
So here's my suggestion: Google should offer a "protected contact list transfer service" whereby there's some sort of link or badge I can click in Twitter, Facebook, wherever. The link takes me to a page within Gooogle's domain where I login, and where the contact list transfer takes place. I can then go back to the host page. I envisage this process a bit like PayPal payment integration -- you temporarily leave a site to make a transaction within PayPal, then get redirected back to the site when the transaction is successful.
Better yet, Google should be able to guarantee me that the host site can only access the contact list for this fetch only. Maybe they could make the host site pay for this service? Maybe it could be an API?
Until Google offers such a service, I'm always going to be wary of giving a third party access to my email.
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