Yahoo’s Address Book may not be the highlight of the company’s repertoire, but it is unquestionably one of its most valuable foundations, providing user contact support for popular services like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, and Yahoo Go. Hundreds of millions of people continually rely on it on a daily basis. So as folks in Sunnyvale, California, announce today the public release of the Address Book API, many developers are likely to spring to attention.
Thus far, the Yahoo Address Book API has only been provided to a select number of developers. Plaxo and LinkedIn are just a couple of third parties which have employed the API. [img src="http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/yahoaddressscreen.gif" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Now connections to the platform can be made through many more external devices and in a myriad of ways. Yahoo Address Book product manager Charles Wu offers examples such as sending invitations to build social networks, looking up everything from email addresses to phone numbers to postal addresses for shipping services for online retail, and providing auto-complete for messaging applications. Third party developers can also utilize the API to automatically enact searches for new contacts stored by Address Book users, a seemingly simple script that can help synchronize accounts across a variety of services, whether Yahoo-based or or not.