Allowing users to invite their contacts from other networks or e-mail providers is a popular method used in social networks & web applications.

OpenInviter is an open source PHP class, written in PHP5, for importing contacts from most of the well-known e-mail providers & social networks.

Such an invite feature is great, specially when presented as optional, to gain new users/visitors to any service.

There are already ready to use integrations for:

• Wordpress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• phpBB & more.

OpenInviter supports:

• Gmail
• Windows Live
• Yahoo
• Mail.com
• Facebook
• Friendster
• hi5
• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Myspace & more..

This is not a usual resource post of WRD but considering it may be handy when building web applications, here it is.

This is about a post published in TechCrunch, so most of you might have followed it.

It is about Carsonified creating the Matt (a multi-account Twitter tweeter application) in 4 days, how they did it, advices and they recorded it too.

I’ve been to their FOWD & FOWA conferences, personally met with Ryan Carson and saw how a small but concentrated team doing great jobs. So, I like Carsonified applications (like DropSend). This is why I think their advices are real world advices which can be handy.

There is also an interesting conversation going on with the comments.

A Techcrunch reader, Chris, finds the 4 days & $10,000 spent for the application much and starts creating a similar application in few hours (lack of design & PR). You may follow comments of him. Two different approaches when creating the application.

Putting inputs like del.icio.us posts - tags, Yahoo - Google searches, Twitter friends, Youtube videos, mixing them how you want & getting outputs to show anywhere you want. Why not?

Similar to Yahoo Pipes, but not the same, Afrous is a JavaScript-based mash up engine which runs entirely on your web browser. No software installation is needed, no server hosting is required. You can quickly get started, create any mash-ups, run, and share them. Plenty of web services are now available and mashable under this JavaScript engine.

What can be created with Afrous depends on creativity as there are many inputs and lots of output preferences. Some already built samples include del.icio.us recently tagged pie chart & del.icio.us tag x flickr photos.

You can also extend Afrous’s capabilities with custom-built javascripts.