Yahoo! Opens Address Book

This is a project I’ve been helping drive for a while, and I’m happy to see it come to fruition: Yahoo! user address books are now officially portable. (Additional coverage: TechCrunch, Techmeme, and a great interview with Joseph Smarr at Plaxo.)

Developers can build against it on a self-serve basis (no BD deal needed for basic use), enabling users to import their address books or pieces of data from it. We also have a sync interface for approved partners. Access is via bbAuth, enhancing user security (and will likely be via oAuth at some point in the future).

The key news here is Yahoo! is making this data freely available, on the assumption that it’s the users’ data - not Yahoo!’s. As you look at this alongside the openness of some of our other social API’s (e.g. MyBlogLog), there’s a consistent theme here in that Yahoo! is not trying to “own” this data, but is rather following the O’Reilly maxim of creating more value than we collect — and letting that value inure to users and the developers building stuff for them.

Watch this space — you’ll be seeing more of that theme.