Yahoo is releasing an Address Book API today that will give 3rd-party developers access Yahoo users’ contact lists without the traditional, but primitive, method of page scraping.
In addition to searching for specific contacts and fields and reading their data, developers can use it to add contacts and change existing records (although to start, only pre-approved developers will have the right to make edits).
Chris Yeh, the head of the Yahoo developer network, considers this release the second major “proof point” of Yahoo’s Open Services (YOS) campaign, which kicked off at the Web 2.0 Expo in March. The first point was Search Monkey, which makes it possible for anyone to enhance the way website results are displayed in Yahoo search.
As with Microsoft and Google’s own contact APIs, Yahoo has decided to implement a proprietary permission system – theirs called bbAuth – rather than implement an open protocol like oAuth. Yeh says he hopes to see oAuth adopted by Yahoo in the near term, although he couldn’t say when that might happen.
LinkedIn and Plaxo are two launch partners who have already implemented the new API and even used it publicly over the past several months.
Yeh says there is no policy in place for restricting how long developers can store and use the data they pull from the API. But, as with many of its developer initiatives, Yahoo reserves the right to stop what it deems bad behavior.
As Dave McClure suggested to me recently, it would be very powerful if developers could not only retrieve basic contact information from webmail services like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, but could also determine the types of relationships a user has with those contacts. For example, if I wanted to pull out a user’s top 5 contacts, I could do so by looking at the frequency of messages sent to all contacts. This lookup could be refined by targeting only messages with certain keywords so that contacts belonging to particular categories (say, golf enthusiasts) could be identified by their messages.
Unfortunately, no such advanced querying is available with Yahoo’s new API, at least to start. Yeh does assure me that other groups within the YOS campaign are looking at how to identify relationships within the address book, so hopefully we’ll see this type of functionality down the line.
Nice!
If this is anything like searchmonkey it’s going to be useless. I was at the searchmonkey event. One developer put it best. “I know why it’s called searchmonkey. because they are using us as their monkey.
Seriously, so they aren’t going to add any features to address book so they’re just going to open it up….Well, whoever makes a great printable address book or the ability to print labels will get my business.
“It would be very powerful if developers could not only retrieve basic contact information from webmail services like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, but could also determine the type of relationship a user has with those contacts. For example, if I wanted to pull out a user’s top 5 contacts, I could do so by looking at the frequency of messages sent to all contacts. This lookup could be refined by targeting only messages with certain keywords so that contacts belonging to particular categories (say, golf enthusiasts) could be identified by their messages.”
I guess I’m the only one, but I don’t appreciate companies giving out the personal notes and info people have about me in their email address books (and correspondence potentially). Users include things like personal phone numbers, personal info, etc. I don’t appreciate having it sold to some company so they can pester me.
It’s really none of their business to go through our personal emails.
@mish: I think you’re mishing the point (sorry couldnt resist
Yahoo (or others) wouldn’t be giving out your email info — rather, they’d be enabling 3rd-party services to let YOU use your *own* address & message data programmatically to share/invite other users. usage would still be authorized by the owner, and only available to the service provider & others if you approve.
however by using keyword relevance & messaging frequency as filters, you wouldn’t have to upload or spam your entire address book, just the top 3-5 most relevant contacts you know.
ok, thanks for setting me straight!
btw, this post was what stirred the conversation with mark on programmatic access to address book & messaging data, using messaging frequency & keyword relevance:
Memo to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, & AOL: How to Turn 500M email logins into Facebook Platform & a Crapload of Revenue
http://500hats....-to-google.html
again, it’s a fairly simple concept that would be pretty easy for any of the major email service providers (Goog, Yahoo, Msft, AOL) to offer. ditto for Facebook, MySpace, other SNS platforms. probably also other large platforms of note such as Amazon, eBay, Apple, a few others with >50-100M users.
in particular since now Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft all provide API access to contact data, should be relatively easy for them to enhance that slightly and use messaging data for better targeting. only hard part there would be making it quick, but i’m pretty sure at the very least Google should be able to make that happen. (and Yahoo & Microsoft would then likely race to compete as well).
imho, this is the SINGLE most important function / feature that the major platform providers can offer to make the rest of the web socially-enabled. it’s very simple, doesn’t require a bunch of re-engineering, and would be quickly adopted by 3rd-party developers in websites in short order…
kudos & kisses to whomever gets there first.
Great! Someone please develop a way to sync Yahoo! with other webmail address books, namely, Gmail, so that I (we) can keep my contacts on my iPhone synced with my Gmail account. The only reason I (we) have a Yahoo! account is to keep these contacts on the web. I (We) don’t use Outlook, just Gmail. Someone…anyone…please.
This is not so good though. Just yesterday a chinese company/guys hacked my hotmail account, sent email to all my contacts, from me, promoting their product/site. It could be very embarrasing if they do so for porn or viruses. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo need to think more, think well before competing in this space.
I didn’t know LinkedIn made their API public. As far as I know, it was a closed API. Care to provide sources?
This is the same that google did a few weeks ago with the Google Mail Contacts API
http://code.goo.../apis/contacts/
I wish there a real person to talk to at Yahoo about obtaining some screen names that I previous signed up for, and one that I use for my 360 profile, but can’t get a address for.
Mike, they don’t have open API (Linked In that is).
They are using Yahoo’s API for their own uses.
This is a great move. It’s a person’s mail app, and Yahoo! is right to let them share access to it.
A feature not offered via the API that yahoo mail users would very much like to have is that ability to allow an approved internet service to auto-add that service’s email to the approving user’s yahoo mail address book.
This way when they join a join a new service that they expect to get emails from, they will get the emails instead of missing them because the aggressive yahoo spam algorithms misclassify it as spam.
If Yahoo really wants to show they believe the mail data is the users, not yahoo’s they should go ahead and allow full user control of it.
But, the Y! mail API as it is, is a big step in the right direction. Round of applause.
Even better when all these email contacts can also be linked with your cell phone address book and calling records. TechCrunch posted about SkyDeck’s service and opening their API last week… my post: Web 2.0 Your Cell Voice Records
I think these big email service providers should introduce extra services that are found in facebook. I love some of the applications found on facebook.
To Jim M’s comment about labels and printable address books, as Product Manager for the Yahoo! Address Book platform, just wanted to mention that Yahoo! does offer Printable Address book capability under the Options settings of the Yahoo! address book. We also create PDFs of mailing labels as well. Now does it satisfy everyone, probably not.
However that’s the kind of ideas that we hope developers will make, for instance custom printable address books using the data, such as printouts for different kinds of day planners so people will have paper and online versions of their data.
Great move by Yahoo! to roll this out. Too bad they did not use OAuth.
Funny how LinkIn is using Yahoo’s API to get data, but still has all our data locked up in LinkIn.com. When will LinkedIn’s promised API be available?!?!?
@dickhardt: Adam Nash from LinkedIn will be keynoting at Graphing Social Patterns East next week in DC… hope to hear some news on their platform & API then.
Dave,
as for your comments above, is your idea of better email platform similar to Xobni, an Outlook add-on? I hope so, just making sure
This leads me to another question: isn’t there a way of integrating all email platforms (e.g. Outlook, webmails etc.) into a social conversation system? Such a system could replace email as we know it now.
What do you think?
Yahoo! has experimented with OAuth in some areas. Their recently released location brokerage service – FireEagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/) uses it.
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