Yahoo! Contacts API

The Yahoo! Contacts API is a member of the YOS social family of APIs that enables your application to leverage the billions of social relationships that exist in the Yahoo! Address Book. The Yahoo! Address Book consists of the contacts that a user has entered into their Address Book via Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Go, and other products and services across Yahoo! Network. The Contacts API is based on OAuth, which allows the secure transfer of data in a manner that respects user privacy and permissions.

With this API, you can find addresses to assist with communications such as email, instant messaging, SMS, or even plain old postal mail. You can also look up addresses for auto-completion of emails, add addresses for future shipping information, or sync with another address book.

Some of the key highlights of this API include:

• Identify the Users' Trusted Contacts: The Address Book often contains contacts who have a wide range of relationships with the user. The Contacts API allows you to sort the user's most socially relevant contacts (aka connections). For example, a user may have the email address of his or her dentist in their address book, but that contact is probably not as socially relevant to the user as a friend or a family member.
• Update Contacts Automatically: When two users create a “connection,” the contact info in their Address Books are automatically kept in sync from that point on. So, if a user really cares about a friend and creates a “connection” with that friend, the user will see his Address Book be automatically updated when the friend changes contact information in his/her social profile.
• Get Data Fast and Reliably: Yahoo! sees more than half a billion monthly unique visitors, so reliability and scalability are of cardinal importance. Thus, Yahoo! has made sure that the API is fast and reliable, so you don't have to worry about business continuity issues.

How Do I Get Started?

1. Get an API Key
2. Read the online documentation
3. Learn about OAuth
4. Get our PHP SDK or Flash SDK (optional)

Using the API or Web Service

Overview

Typical uses of the Yahoo! Contacts API include looking up e-mail addresses, contact info, phone numbers, and postal addresses, or sending invitations. Phone numbers can be used for mobile message; postal addresses, for shopping and photo-sharing services.

The key operations include:

• Simple Query: Get specific information from a user’s Address Book, such as fetching phone numbers through the API.
• Search: Find contact records that match a certain set of criteria. This is often used for real-time look-up on specific contact information.
• Updating of Contact Data: Create, modify, and delete contact information. The Contacts API reduces duplication in a user’s address book by auto-merging identical contacts.
• Synchronization: Update contact information that has changed since the last access and synchronize the user’s Address Book with another source.

Flash Support

Build Yahoo! Social Applications with Flash. Learn more.

Support and Community

If you have questions, suggestions, or need technical support, please use the Yahoo! Contacts Developer Community forum.

Rate Limits

The Contacts API service is limited to 5,000 queries per IP per day.

Commercial Terms

We understand that you may want to leverage our APIs for commercial use. We are working on releasing premium services that offer commercial use and higher traffic volumes in applications that utilize the Contacts API. Until then, if you have special needs that are not supported by our existing Terms of Use, please reach out to us by email for further assistance.

Terms of Use

Use of the Yahoo! Contacts API is governed by the Yahoo! APIs Terms of Use.