Jeremy wrote a while back about the "password anti-pattern" - which is a terrible, fucked-up idea. After the dust-up with Quechup, a lot of people - myself included - feel that handing out our e-mail password to Yet Another Social Network is a bit of a stupid idea. I mean, banks don't give their customers keys to their safe.
Anyway, Dopplr allows you to point it to a web page with hCards on it and it'll check the e-mail addresses of people on that page and then let you easily add anyone with that e-mail to your friends list.
I've been meaning to do this for Gmail. I exported the CSV from Gmail, wrote a short Python script (LGPL) which converts it into an HTML page containing hCards, and then uploaded the result. Then I pointed Dopplr to this private web page, and it pointed out a few people I'd forgotten to add to my network.
It's not user friendly, but it doesn't require giving a Web 2.0 startup (admittedly one I trust - I briefly met Matt Biddulph at FOWA and know people who've worked with him) the keys to my fricking e-mail account.
I wish social networks would let me download my social network in a FOAF file or an HTML page containing hCard/XFN. That way I can choose how I want to reuse that data. FOAF is particularly good for this because it's expressive enough to describe pretty much everything one could ever conceive of in a social network, and I can SPARQL hCards out of them.
Jeremy said that he's not going to build websites that use the password anti-pattern. Well, let me say this here: I do not give my passwords out to other sites. Perhaps the e-mail providers should take this as a suggestion and let users export their data and use OpenID/OAuth to allow other web services to get data out of them in a way controllable by the user.
