Introducing the WhitePages.com API

From the days in Alex’s dorm room in 1996, to incorporating in 2000, to launching its first mobile site in 2006, WhitePages.com has been about doing one thing well - fast, easy, and free access to nationwide contact information for the people you care about.

It may be hard to remember, but before the interwebs, it wasn’t just that looking up people locally required either thumbing-through-the-book or paying $0.25 to call 411; if you wanted to find somebody in another state, you had to call XXX-555-1212 and hope you guessed right. (There were fewer area codes then, of course. Also, we didn’t have fire.)

Offline, not much has changed, except that the calls now cost $1.79. The data’s basically the same. And until about a year ago, the data on WhitePages.com, 411.com, and our other sites was all basically the same as you could get when you dialed 411 or visited our competitors. In the last year, though, we’ve gone from the 90 million people listed in the hundreds of thousands of pages of phone books to 180 million people across the US.

We’re proud of what we’ve done, and we’re proud of what we’ve built at WhitePages.com to make this a sustainable, profitable business, with user experiences that people recommend. As my first year here comes to a close, I’ve seen the care and pride that went into building the technology, the sales and business development businesses, the customer experience, etc. over the last 10 years.

But it’s not enough.

We believe in more than just our websites and our brands; we believe that contact information is a core building block of the internet experience, that connecting to the people you care about is a fundamental human need, and that keeping core contact information behind pay or login walls so that people can’t manage their offline social network without using your online social network makes it harder for everyone - ordinary people and developers alike. This data is already out there, for free, but unless you browse to websites like ours, you don’t find it (and often pay for it). As Tim O’Reilly wrote in O’Reilly Radar:

What really needs to be done is not just to connect the various social networks that do exist in internet network-of-networks style, but also to social-network enable our real social network apps: our IM, our email, our phone. Where, I keep asking vendors, is the Web 2.0 address book?

We aren’t there yet, and we’re not going to get there on our own. We’re a small team (but hiring!), and we’re going to focus on our core - building a great data set (meaningfully beyond what we have today), scalable technology, and a great experience for our website customers. There are dozens of apps available now that would benefit from having access to our data to help people find and connect. And while our business is built on top of the advertisements we serve when people visit our websites, we know this information wants to be free – free of charge and free of walls.

So today, we’re making available virtually all of our data free as part of our new beta web services API. Our core search types - People Search, Reverse Phone, & Reverse Address - are now available for free to developers building applications for consumers. The data you see on our website is the data you’ll see in the API. Documentation, sample apps, and forums are all at the WhitePages.com Developer Portal.

We soft-launched the API on Thursday afternoon with a few subtle links, and since then have seen more than 100 signups, thousands of API calls, and one bug report.

We’ve partnered with Mashery to make the API easy to access. We’re running a contest for the best iPhone & best social networking application. We’re in the forums, and will be joining Mashery at their booth during the Web 2.0 Expo. We’re jumping in with both feet, and if we can build and support a developer community around the data and APIs, plan to be here for quite a while.

The privacy rules that apply to our website apply to our API: WhitePages.com Privacy Central provides more information about our privacy approach and policy.

We’ll be adding a number of improvements through the year and beyond, and as we improve our core functionality, we’ll bring the API along. We have more ideas for expanding the API, and we’d love to hear yours in the forums.

Lastly, please join me in thanking the team: Dan, Bruce, Ewa, Zine, Josh, Snezana, & Sabra, for whom this has been a primary job for some time (and who pushed hard to make it available internally for Hack Week), and Sahni, Alison, Tiffany, Kyle, Sabrina, Travis, Mitch, Jason, Colin, Brian (who developed one of the sample apps during Hack Week), Jolene, Ben, and a number of others who invested time at the beginning, middle, end, or some combination to bring this to you. Look for their names in the forums!