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.