Adding Multiple Yahoo! Contacts to Live Messenger

I read somewhere that users can now add Yahoo Messenger buddies to new Live Messenger. So I wanted to play with it. I installed new Live Messenger and started adding my yahoo messenger contacts. But you guessed it right. It is pain in the butt to add each contact individually. Thankfully Live has a feature where you can import new contacts in a bunch via a file. Great! So I made a text file from my yahoo contacts that I wanted to add. I thought "Voila!" Piece of cake.. But not exactly. I got error that my file is not in the correct format. OK. Fair enough. If importing from any text file is allowed, anybody will create their own text file formats and who will check them? So there must be a particular format that is expected.

Now how do I get this format. Using internet search did not help much. Then suddenly it struck me. There is also an option to save contacts into a file. That means all I needed to do was reverse engineering. Add one yahoo contact manually. Then use the feature to save this contact into a file. Now copy and paste all my contacts from the text file into the Live format file. After that import the modified Live format file again. Super!

Here are the steps.

1. Add a yahoo contact manually to your Live messenger contact.
2. Save the contact file. This will have the name username(live).ctt.
3. Open this file using a text editor. It will look like this.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<messenger>
<service name="Windows Live Messenger Service">
<contactlist>
<contact t="32">sampleyahoocontact@yahoo.com</contact>
<contact>samplehotmailcontact@hotmail.com</contact>
</contactlist>
</service>
</messenger>


As you can see, yahoo contacts have a certain t=32 attribute. I do not know what it means, probably type. Hotmail contacts (and live I would guess) do not have any special attribute.

So now I just added my yahoo contacts in this file and appended them with the xml tag.
I wish there was an easy way from yahoo to export all the contacts to a text file. That would be great.

Assuming that you added two more yahoo contacts to this file. Your modified file will look like this.



<?xml version="1.0"?>
<messenger>
<service name="Windows Live Messenger Service">
<contactlist>
<contact t="32">sampleyahoocontact@yahoo.com</contact>
<contact>samplehotmailcontact@hotmail.com</contact>
<contact t="32">sampleyahoocontact_1@yahoo.com</contact>
<contact t="32">sampleyahoocontact_2@yahoo.com</contact>

</contactlist>
</service>
</messenger>


After this, I saw the contacts in my Live buddy list. There are some fine steps. But I do not believe in spoon feeding. So good luck.