Ok I have spent too much time trying to understand how the contacts api was designed. Lets see,

Here is the example response when you try to get all contacts via http://social.yahooapis.com/v1/user/{guid}/contacts

# {"contact":
# {
# "created" : "date",
# "updated" : "date",
# "uri" : "link",
# "isConnection : boolean,
# "id" : numeric,
# "fields" : [
# Field Object,
# Field Object,
# ...
# ],
# "categories" : [
# Category Object,
# Category Object,
# ...
# ]
# }
# }

Ok so I get everything I dont need(Do most people really care when was this contact last updated?) but not the guid of this contact(which IMO is obviously the most important field), EVEN if they are a yahoo user, with a yahoo_id.

Ok, so maybe I have a a yahoo_id for all my contacts, and I can get my yahoo_id, and correlate, so lets try the TinyUserCard profile api at http://social.yahooapis.com/v1/user/{guid}...le/tinyusercard

This gives reponse in format,

{ "profile" : { "guid" : "text", "nickname" : "text", "image": { "size": WxH, "width": numeric, "height": numeric, "imageUrl": "link" } "gender" : "M" | "F" | "UNSPECIFIED", "profileUrl" : "link", "uri" : "link", } }

Which doesn't have yahoo_id.

Frankly that is totally weird API design IMO. What format I can get data in for my contacts, shouldn't I be able to get for myself as well? With an APi endpoint like, http://social.yahooapis.com/v1/user/{guid}/self .

For example see the Google Contacts API,

http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/...pers_guide.html

The API endpoint http://www-opensocial.googleusercontent.co...eople/@me/@self gives data in exact same format as http://www-opensocial.googleusercontent.co...people/@me/@all .

So what am I failing to understand?

Not sure of the language you are using but to get a users GUID for your app - the user must first give your application access to their information - this includes their GUID.
Giving permission to the app is done during the bbauth or oauth process. The provided SDK's(for whatever programming language you use) are a good reference for this.

Hi,
I am spent lots of time how to fetch contacts from my yahoo mailid using yahoo api.but i am unable to do that one. i am facing problem in creating GUID
can u tell me how i can create GUID programatically in java.which i can use and fetch the contacts
thanks