can Yahoo and Hotmail contacts api be used without leaving the site?

Question

I might be missing something but I'm trying to implement a contacts retrieval mechanism akin to the one that is offered by Google for Yahoo and Hotmail. Both APIs seem to require the user to actually go to their sites to log in. The documentation is really convoluted for both. I was hoping someone has done this and can point me to a simple way (if there is one) to allow the user to log in directly in my app and then for me to go and fetch their contacts for them (preferably in XML, but JSON would also do nicely).

I currently have a Perl script that goes and gets the gmail stuff and works very nicely. I was (maybe wildly optimistically) hoping that Yahoo and Microsoft would have similarly useful mechanisms.

Journalese

Should be. I never actually log on to the yahoo/hotmail to import my contacts in linkedin/facebook. – Milkwhite

possible duplicate of A PHP API for retrieving Mail From Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail – Muckworm

Answer 1

Check out Open Inviter: http://openinviter.com. It has Yahoo, Hotmail, and many more :)

Parra

this does, indeed, look very promising. Checking into it now. – Journalese

yeah, this is totally fabulous. Their documentation is really shoddy, but the product works exactly as advertised. Server permissions may need to be tweaked to allow the php to examine the directories it needs to look at. – Journalese

Awesome. I haven't actually tried it myself (other than the demo) but that's good to hear that it works :D – Parra

To anyone reading this (2012), OpenInviter appears to be currently broken (atleast with regards to Hotmail, LinkedIn etc). – Impeccable

Answer 2

Seems http://openinviter.com domain is no more. There are few other providers available in market out of which I liked https://socialinviter.com, give it a try.

Agnesse