Yahoo! Hacks

Import Yahoo! Local Listings into Your Address Book

A freely available program called gvcard can help you import a Yahoo! Local listing into your email address book, cell phone, or any application that understands vCard.

Have you ever wondered why it is so darn hard to import search results from Yellow Pages sites like Yahoo! Local (http://local.yahoo.com) into other programs? Whether you are at your desk or using your fancy Treo 650, wouldn’t it be nice if you could import these addresses, phone numbers, and URLs directly into your address book? Now you can.

gvcard (http://gvcard.sf.net) is a free program that wraps common Yellow Pages services from Yahoo! and Google and makes their results available in the vCard format. gvcard is written in Python and the source code is available via CVS.

gvcard comes in four flavors (all four versions are available at the gvcard web site):

• A standalone CGI script that you can run from any web site

• A command-line client you can run locally just about anywhere

• A weblet version of the CGI script that you can also run locally

• A plug in for IMSmarter.com (http://imsmarter.com/developer.php) that allows you to access gvcard over IM

At the heart of gvcard is the vCard standard: a simple text-based format that almost all phone book, address book, and calendaring applications understand. vCard allows these programs to share contact information across a wide variety of platforms. By wiring vCard up to Yahoo! Local, gvcard helps you avoid searching for the same ...