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Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle! Yahoo! web sites, search, and search advertising.

  1. Oct30

    Yahoo! Open Strategy launch

    Yahoo! Open Strategy sign

    On Tuesday Yahoo! launched its Open Strategy, exposing Yahoo! account data and social connections to third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is the third pillar of faith announced by CEO Jerry Yang last year during the company's rebirth. Y!OS is the new glue connecting the next versions of Yahoo!'s own properties and will eventually power more relevant advertising across the network. In this post I will provide an overview of the new Yahoo! services and its impact on both Yahoo! and third-party developers. Yahoo! Open Strategy is one of the keynote presentations at Widget Summit next week.

    The Yahoo! Open Strategy first and foremost unites Yahoo!'s own product fiefdoms into a common set of interchangeable components. The new platform ties together social features and rich content units across Yahoo! properties in much the same way as YUI abstracts a common set of JavaScript and CSS interactions across Yahoo!. The company announced plans to integrate the Y!OS platform into a new version of My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail over the next year.

    Yahoo!, like many portals, receives most of its user activity from mail and IM networks. These are the explicit social networks, tracking who we communicate with every day and at what frequency. Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and Yahoo! Mail represent some of the largest front-doors on the Web across a very international audience. Yahoo! is building upon these established strong relationships to construct a social platform receiving new, relevant inputs every day. Y!OS is a partial answer to Yahoo!'s build vs. buy decision it faced in September 2006 when Yahoo! reportedly offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion (about $400 million at today's share price).

    A new Yahoo! Profile

    Yahoo! Profile

    The new Yahoo! profile pages collect more information on every Yahoo! user in an interface that is easy to discover and share. Yahoo! previously buried this data inside user account preferences and really didn't provide much motivation to keep profile data up-to-date. The new Yahoo! profile is at the center of the Yahoo! Social experience, motivating participating users to better describe themselves to connected friends and services.

    Exposing this profile data across Yahoo! applications ultimately leads to richer ad-mining for Yahoo! and its partners.

    Social APIs

    Yahoo! tracks explicit and implicit user connections through its Contacts platform and Social Directory. Messenger buddies, address book entries, and direct communications all influence the Yahoo! social platform. Yahoo! social features are similar to what publishers have come to expect inside a Facebook social graph or combined news feed but adds live user presence (online/offline) to the mix.

    Yahoo! Application Platform

    Yahoo! Application Platform small view sample

    The Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) adds third-party content to Yahoo! properties through a full-page editing canvas and small widgets. The Yahoo! Application Platform is build on OpenSocial 0.8 JavaScript APIs combined with Yahoo!'s own markup language similar to a server-side include and FBML.

    The YAP widget view is restricted to static content for speed. Developers can't use JavaScript, PHP, or other languages within a Yahoo! widget and are not allowed to display any advertising or promotions. These heavy restrictions strip the widget down to its essentials for the sake of speed and scalability. The no-advertising and no-promotions clause may cause companies to rethink content monetization on the Yahoo! platform.

    Summary

    Cody Simms and Neal Sample

    The Yahoo! Open Strategy 1.0 release is just the beginning of Yahoo!'s rewiring. The platform really gets interesting once Yahoo! flips on My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail support, enabling 500 million worldwide users to access new content. Yahoo! already owns a compelling notification platform in Messenger and Mail, which should drive the virality of applications through invitations and updates that actually reach their intended recipient. Yahoo! has assembled a small team of ex-BEA middleware experts behind the scenes to drive new Java-based platform apps across the company and around the world. The Y!OS launch this week is a good start and I'm looking forward to Yahoo! delivering on its vision.

  2. Feb22

    Yahoo! centralizes its JavaScript network with free hosting

    Yahoo! is opening up the JavaScript powering its websites a bit more tonight, encouraging developers to directly reference libraries on its servers from within their webpages. Yahoo! User Interface Hosting opens up versioned access to the popular YUI Library, creating faster load times for sites across the web using Yahoo's optimized, geo-distributed, and reliable data centers.

    Yahoo! UI hosting sample code

    Many websites utilize common libraries for JavaScript development, creating a drop-down menu, file retrieval, or chart rendering using a library such as Prototype, script.aculo.us, dojo, and many others. If five Ruby on Rails sites utilize the same script.aculo.us library for effects you'll have to download the same file(s) five times from each of the five different domains. Centralized resources such as YUI Hosting create a single download source requiring one file download regardless of the number of sites taking advantage of the YUI library.

    Yahoo! is a global company and spends a lot of money serving up web content as fast as possible in London, San Francisco, or Tokyo. The central YUI files are on that same network, creating a shorter path from a user's browser to required files needed to enhance a website. Pulling files from a separate domain also creates an opportunity for more parallel content downloads, circumventing the two requests per host limit in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

    Yahoo! will be logging each request and its page origination, so if you are worried about privacy and providing pageview numbers to outside sources the hosted version of YUI may not be for you (grab a download, host your own).

    A web widget feature

    Version 2.2 of YUI, released on Tuesday, includes support for a new global variable named YAHOO.env. Web widget developers can reference this variable to determine if YUI is already present on the page for additional functionality or before loading a conflicting library. It's a useful feature for blog sidebars, letting your widget peacefully co-exist with a del.icio.us, Flickr, or MyBlogLog widgets/badges without unnecessarily weighing down the page.

    Summary

    I think the Yahoo! Interface Library will continue to gain traction thanks to its heavy development, extensions, and documentation. It's already being used by large sites such as The Wall Street Journal and SmugMug and across the revamp of the Yahoo! network, which are some key votes of confidence important in new technology adoption.

  3. Feb07

    Yahoo! Pipes remixes the syndicated web

    Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes tonight, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction. The 5-person Pipes team, part of the Yahoo! TechDev incubation group, spent about 5 months developing the product to help people better remix the syndicated content they find online.

    Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr. You might automatically translate your favorite news sources to your native language, or only receive the 1 out of 20 news stories from your local paper that reference your town or local schools. A traditional web feed lets you select your news from a set menu, while tools like Yahoo! Pipes let you build your own dish with only the ingredients you care about.

    Yahoo Pipes sample edit interface

    The editing interface connects pre-configured modules and their option, creating a new feed accessible as RSS, Atom, or JSON. Anyone can share their modules, or clone the work of others to tinker a few things and enable their own customizations.

    Yahoo! Pipes opens up some interesting possibility for feed aggregators, letting users filter out unwanted content affecting their experience. Pipes opens up a few feeds that were not practical for a human to read in the past, either due to a high volume or possibly a foreign language. My favorite operator is the location extractor which analyzes an item's text attempting to identify addresses, locations, or the URLs of popular mapping services.

    Publisher Concerns

    Yahoo! Pipes has implications for web publishers, changing the reliability of delivered content, the relationship with the end user, and the polling frequency of a mashup that may or may not be actively utilized.

    Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content. I already know a few publishers who hold back the publishing the full content of their posts for fear of easy resyndication and brand dilution, and if Pipes becomes popular publishers might hold back a bit further or ban Yahoo! Pipes outright. A Yahoo! Mail user searching for a new feed subscription will likely choose an identical feed labeled "No Ads!!!" associated with their favorite brands.

    One of Yahoo!'s sample pipes, Aggregated News Alerts, uses the Technorati search API and republishes a key issued to an individual user. A site such as Technorati can increase that user's allowed queries per day, but they lose control over the issued unique key and its use.

    The Pipes troubleshooting section lists three ways of blocking the tool from using your feeds: modify your Apache settings to block User-Agent "Yahoo Pipes", add a new element to your feed, or send Yahoo! an e-mail asking them to manually add your URLs to a blocked list and verify your authority to make such a request. The suggested meta element added to your XML creates invalid feed markup and might cause your feed to stop appearing in some strict renderers.

    Summary

    Overall I really like Yahoo! Pipes, it's intuitive interface, and its "View Source" approach to building your own web services. I think a lot of people will build interesting new things using the service, and it ties in nicely with services such as Yahoo! Alerts. It's a pretty solid product from the Advanced Products group, leveraging web feeds as a simple web service.

  4. Dec19

    del.icio.us API for URL top tags, bookmark count

    Social bookmarking site del.icio.us has exposed a new API providing the top tags and total number of bookmarks for any URL in its system. Yahoo's Developer Network provided a short preview earlier tonight of a soon to be released del.icio.us web badge but currently anyone can request data from the open API. It's a useful feature to provide additional context for a URL, suggest tags, or measure one aspect of a site's popularity.

    endpoint
    http://badges.del.icio.us/feeds/json/url/blogbadge
    parameter
    hash

    Simply submit a request to the above API endpoint with a hex MD5 hash of the URL of interest as your hash parameter value. Del.icio.us returns results in JSON key-value pairs. Data includes the total number of del.icio.us users who have tagged the given URL and the top 11 tags (and tag count) used to describe its content.

    You can check out a few examples such as the response for del.icio.us, the response for apple.com, or the response for niallkennedy.com/blog. If you need help constructing a MD5 hash you can use Paul Johnson's implementation (del.icio.us uses the same script). You may specify a callback function using the callback parameter.

    The API is officially unreleased, may be shut down if not used in full Yahoo-constructed blog sidebar badge form, and may be subject to further terms of service. Hopefully the new set of del.icio.us servers can keep up with demand.

    Update: Del.icio.us officially announced Tagometer badges as well as a JSON feed of URL data about 16 hours after this post was published.

  5. Oct02

    Open Hack Day helps build YDN from the inside

    Yahoo! hosted a public hack day last weekend, inviting 400 developers to learn more about the company, web development best practices, and how to use Yahoo! services in their own products and projects. The Yahoo! open hack day was the first big effort by a newly formed team seeking to gather support inside and outside Yahoo! as the programming world begins to embrace connected services in the data cloud. In this post I will provide some background on the team behind the event and present some of the direct and indirect benefits obtained within Yahoo! for their hard work.

    Background

    The Yahoo Developer Network and its parent product group has been reborn under new staff and management over the last three months. In June Bradley Horowitz stepped into a new role as VP of Product Strategy leading a product group that includes a few new initiatives and staff. Scott Gatz joined the group to work on project incubations and Caterina Fake is another recent addition in the technology development group.

    The Yahoo! Developer Network has been pretty busy the last few months under the new leadership of Chad Dickerson. In January YDN manager Toni Schneider left Yahoo! to join startup Automattic. A few other staff members left or were fired, and new management put in place under a new organizational structure under Bradley Horowitz. Yahoo! employees Jeremy Zawodny, Kent Brewster, and Matt McAlister replaced the empty headcount and a new team was formed

    Hack Day

    Yahoo! Hack Day Q3 2006 poster

    One of the first tasks of the newly assembled team was a mad dash towards putting together a public Yahoo! hack day a few weeks after the latest internal hackathon. It's time to get to know your teammates and pitch in during what would be a defining moment for the team both inside and outside of Yahoo!

    Ryan Kennedy of Yahoo! MailDouglas CrockfordKent BrewsterTenni Theurer

    A physical event with over 400 attendees expecting food, drinks, Internet connectivity, a space on the lawn, and perhaps help with personal hygiene such as showering takes a lot of work. The event catalyzed internal teams to expedite their API development work such as Flickr's JSON support completed in a day. The amount of external attention focused on Yahoo! over one weekend was a great catalyst for internal developers to put in a little extra work and see results of their labor first-hand, meeting developers face-to-face and bug-fixing API frontends in near real-time.

    The connection with the customer experience by Yahoo! API developers and product teams this weekend will strengthen support for YDN moving forward. The YDN doesn't have an easy job and needs all the internal support they can get to be successful. They rely on the development time and servers of individual teams within Yahoo! to remain a success internally as well as in the marketplace. The continued public exposure of their work to top executives such as Jeff Weiner, Ash Patel, and David Filo will help create continued support of a group without direct revenue.

    Summary

    Overall the open hack day was a big success for the newly formed team and helped solidify their identity within the company. The developer event benefited from first-mover advantage as other large Internet companies look for new ways to embrace web development efforts through open APIs and developer relation programs.

    In a future post I will write about how other companies might create an open culture of participation by hosting their own events actively engaging both focused and broad communities.

  6. Sep29

    Yahoo Mail introduces web APIs

    Yahoo Mail announced a SOAP and JSON-RPC API this morning at Yahoo! Hack Day. The new calls allow any developer to access a Yahoo! user's existing mail preferences, messages, folders, and change data through create, delete or flag. Documentation of the pre-release API is currently only available through the Yahoo! Mail developer mailing list.

    You can do pretty much everything that's possible with the new Yahoo! Mail beta, including searching mail messages (including attachments), fetching mail from external POP accounts, scrubbed HTML message bodies, and MIME decodings. I'm pretty impressed with the amount of effort spent on these APIs and their release two weeks after availability of public beta.

    It's possible to batch your API requests and responses for efficiency. Data for free Yahoo! Mail users is restricted to mail headers only; premium accounts have full access. The API is only enabled on one mail farm (farm 318) today, but the team expects full deployment in the coming months.

  7. Sep26

    Matt McAlister moves to YDN

    Matt McAlister has changed jobs within Yahoo!, moving away from the RSS group and into the Yahoo Developer Network. He follows former RSS PM Scott Gatz into the advanced products and media side of the business under Bradley Horowitz.

    Matt's move is interesting timing given the recent addition of a Yahoo! Mail full beta and all the users that come with it to the backend RSS platform.

    The Product Strategy group at Yahoo! continues to attract company talent into a side of the business I call "Jerry's slush fund." Employees are given more opportunity to think big and take risks without revenue concerns. The group includes free developer APIs, a small incubator, and research groups in Berkeley and London.

  8. Sep21

    Yahoo Hack Day, a career fair for an era of participation

    Yahoo! is hosting an open hack day at their Sunnyvale headquarters next Friday and Saturday, introducing developers to well-known Yahoo! employees and development tools. I view the whole thing as a new take on the career fairs of the past, where introductions happen over clever code instead of a carefully crafted resume attempting to make its way through the various cogs on its way to a decision maker. You can try navigating the Yahoo! careers site to figure out which of the 115 open PHP positions are right for you.

    There are few details available about the event but that hasn't stopped people from flying in from as far away as Australia to attend. A few Yahoo! employees have told me there will be big-name music acts performing each night in what could be the biggest corporate party since Pixelon's $10 million iBash in 1999.

    I'll be attending Hack Day as a curious observer. There should be good talks next Friday on YUI, JSON, and PHP, and the big party is on Saturday night. I'd like to hear a little bit about how Yahoo's tweaked versions of Apache and PHP differ from trunk and learn about some of their real-time attack and statistics analysis. Perhaps a few people will gather on the lawn to talk about running business and product.

    I'll post pictures and updates from the event. Some things that are on my mind that might come into more focus over the next 10 days include:

    • What are reward and recognition methods for top contributors and developers other than being hired by the API or platform provider?
    • Where is the current state of commercial API agreements at large providers? Do popular mashups receive priority access and support?
    • How have structured corporate collaboration events such as hack days changed product group interactions within big companies?
  9. Sep15

    Yahoo! bundled with Acer computers

    Yahoo! and Acer announced a multi-year agreement to bundle Yahoo! Search, Toolbar, and start page with all Acer computers sold around the world. Acer is the top notebook vendor in Europe, Middle East, and Africa and third largest in Asia Pacific according to Gartner. The new deal should give Yahoo!'s international market share a nice boost.

    The press release mentions a cobranded homepage in the style of Yahoo!'s recent redesign. Acer will set Yahoo! as the default search in Internet Explorer 7 and Yahoo! Toolbar will come pre-installed. Yahoo! services will be present on all Acer computers shipping after October 1.

  10. Sep14

    Yahoo! Mail enters public beta

    The new Yahoo! Mail has entered public beta, incorporating many features from Oddpost into a new PHP front-end. The new Yahoo! Mail features a two-pane interface for reading feeds in one scrollable page.

    Yahoo Mail fetch rss feed

    Yahoo! Mail product manager Ethan Diamond told Richard MacManus "the [feed reading] feature is kinda in stealth mode; we are not drawing much attention to it." Yahoo! Mail will auto-subscribe users to "the most popular feeds across the Yahoo! network", adding a few feeds to Yahoo! Mail's user base of over 250 million users.

    The Yahoo! Mail feed view is built on-top of the My Yahoo! feed platform backend (api1.my.mud.yahoo.com). A user's list of subscribed feeds are the same throughout the system and there is no display of read/unread count. Yahoo! Mail will display information from the most recent fetch of your feed in descending order by creation date for up to 51 items. Yahoo! tracks the view state of each entry on mouse-over but there is no click-tracking on outbound links.

    Yahoo! displays the time and date it discovered a published entry regardless of the publisher's own data. There seems to be a bit of a lag based on my testing of frequently updated feeds this morning, so be sure to ping Yahoo! with each post or millions of users might not see your latest content. Yahoo! is still failing Atom title conformance tests among other things.

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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