Yahoo! Hacks

Map Yahoo! Address Book Contacts

Plot the locations of your friends and colleagues on a map of the world with your Yahoo! Address Book and the worldkit mapping application.

The Yahoo! Address Book lets you store more than just names and email addresses. You can store complete contact information for everyone, including street address, city, state, and country. If you have more than a dozen or so contacts stored, you might not realize how geographically dispersed everyone is. This hack plots the locations of all of your Yahoo! Address Book contacts on a map, so you can visualize where your friends, family, and coworkers live.

Plotting each contact’s location is possible thanks to Yahoo!’s Address Book export feature, which provides all of your address book data in commaseparated value (CSV) format. From there, a freely available web service called Geocoder (http://geocoder.us) translates each address into its longitude and latitude. And finally, worldkit (http://brainoff.com/worldkit) plots each point on a map.

Preparing Your Address Book

Right now, your address book might be in sloppy condition (mine was), including misspelled addresses, missing states and countries, and abbreviated cities. Geocoding requires some degree of accuracy to find good matches, so before getting started, tidy your address book up. It’s not necessary to produce a pristine address book, but you need at least a city and country, and a state abbreviation for U.S. locations. Street addresses for U.S. contacts ...