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.
June 4th, 2008 13:21
Very exciting stuff. Definitely the way to go. Congrats.
Any chance there is write/update access via the API.
A huge feature that yahoo mail users would appreciate is letting a webservice they use auto-add the services email address to the users yahoo mail address book, so they don’t have to worry about not receiving emails from services they sign up for?
Very cool either way.
June 4th, 2008 21:31
Always a happy day when our Yahoo brethren dance down the path of Open. As you say, can’t wait for the more to come.
“inure” - I had to look that word up - that’s what happens when you have an English scholar writing blog posts!
June 5th, 2008 08:41
LOL - you’d think that would make my posts better written, wouldn’t you?
June 10th, 2008 07:20
For your list, I covered the address book API announcement for CNET News.com, too: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9959469-7.html
June 17th, 2008 10:54
This is great, having an alternative to cURL/regex flakiness to scrape this data is going to be very helpful.
July 15th, 2008 17:42
Very nice. Love how Y! continues to open up. More data sharing means happier users and more business for everyone!