How do I programatically list my LinkedIn contacts?

Question

I have searched the LinkedIn APIs, but I cannot see a way to get the contacts. I know that there are some applications that have this functionality, but I am wondering is this legal or if they use some kind of partner API?

Answer 1

I think that the Connections API probably does what you need.

This is a Web API, so from Java you would need to use an URL.connect() or Apache HttpClient or something like that, using an appropriately formed request URL. Then you'd need to configure an XML parser to parse the XML response body and extract the contact details.

As the page states, your client needs to be authenticated (as you) to access your contacts, and the API won't let you see details that you cannot see using your web browser.