Yahoo! releases Address Book API following Google & Microsoft

When Google pushed out their Contacts API in March 2008, it was called "the most in-demand API on the web that hadn't yet existed". Those APIs are important because they allow socially aware applications to offer users the ability to import information from their address books without having to worry about giving up their password to a third-party site. The application seeking the information also no longer needs to employ any screen scraping to gather information.

Soon after that, Microsoft also released the beta version of their Windows Live Contacts API in March 2008. In addition to a full contact management interface for a Windows Live user's address book, the Windows Live Contacts API provides a view to a subset of the Contact data for the purposes of sending Invitations.

Now, Yahoo! has also joint the bandwagon to launch their Address Book API in June 2008. Similar to Google and Microsoft, Yahoo! opted to employ their own authentication technology in the API, namely BBAuth. They intend to supports OAuth in the future, though, which will make it easier for developers to use the API.

The Yahoo! Address Book API is a JSON/XML interface for accessing and updating the Yahoo! Address Book using a web service. It can be used to look up addresses for auto-completion of emails, to add addresses for future shipping information, to obtain unique identifiers for network invites, or to sync with another address book.

Click here to go to the webpage of the Yahoo! Address Book API.