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

Social Directory is the core social platform that manages users' Yahoo!-wide social identity and relationship graph. Social Directory has two major APIs. The Profiles API provides access to users' social identity - their profile, interests, contact info, age, gender, location, photo etc. The Connections API provides access to users' social graph on Yahoo!. Learn More.

Contacts

The Contacts API provides access to 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 from Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mobile and other third party applications. Learn More.

User Status

The Status API provides read and write access to users' status across the Yahoo! network. The API is used by key Yahoo! products, including the Yahoo! Home Page, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Profiles and Yahoo! Mobile applications. 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.