Yahoo!'s Social APIs

Yahoo!'s Social API suite brings the power of the Yahoo! network and all its inherent social connections to the table. The social suite is comprised of the Social Directory, Contacts, User Status and Updates APIs. The API suite opens up user data, a user's connections across a variety of experiences, user status and timely updates about user activity across a variety of Yahoo! and non-Yahoo! applications.

Social Directory

The Social Directory APIs are the core of the social experience capabilities and access user identity tools, invitations for connection, user contact lists and online presence. Learn More.

Contacts

The Contacts APIs allow developers to access user contact information stored in the user's Yahoo! Address Book. It includes those contacts which are connections, plus any other contacts added by Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Yahoo! Go and third party contacts synchronization applications. Learn More.

User Status

These APIs expose an individual user's status on the network. Learn More.

Updates

The Yahoo! Updates APIs collect, organize, and syndicate summaries of user activity and content. These summaries, called updates, can be organized by source, time, location, subject, relationship, etc. Consider a Yahoo! specific example; User A writes a review on Yahoo! Local. An update is published. User B, User A's friend, sees the update in Yahoo! Messenger and clicks through back to Yahoo! Local to read the full review. Learn More.

Yahoo! Support for OpenSocial

Yahoo! is committed to supporting the social network open standard in the web application development world: OpenSocial. OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across different websites. Using standard JavaScript and HTML, OpenSocial developers can create applications that access a user's profile information, social connections and activity. To learn more about OpenSocial and Yahoo!'s leadership in the open standards community, please visit the OpenSocial home page.