Yahoo!

54 posts filed under this category.

Yahoo! Open Strategy launch

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.

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. 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Flickr adds itself to your map and calendar

The Flickr team introduced new features today allowing its users to easily associate an uploaded photo with location and event information. The geolocation drag-and-drop interface and search (shown above) is powered by the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. Event integration is handled through a special event tag generated by sister Yahoo! site Upcoming.org. The Organize interface is heavily influenced by Aqua Dock on Mac OS X. Photos dragged off the map disappear in a poof and the currently selected picture within an info is magnified relative to objects surrounding it. You can drag-and-drop images onto the map within Flickr’s interface…

Yahoo! Autos digging for feedback

A few members of the Yahoo! Autos team created a new feedback and suggestion system during a recent company Hack Day incorporating some of the bubble-up recommendation system to their own support and feedback loops. Instead of submitting yet another request for motorcycle coverage on the site, the existing request is shown on the Yahoo! Autos feedback page allowing anyone on the Internet to +1 the recommendation. (via Y! Cool Thing of the Day) I like the idea of the public-facing repository in an easy to browse and understand format. The multiple votes cast into a particular feature bucket should…

NY Times on Google’s lack of focus

Saul Hansell of The New York Times examines Google’s current product offerings and feature gaps and comes away a bit puzzled. According to quotes in the article Google goes for the wow factor with stand-alone products that do not integrate well with the work of others. Marissa Mayer says it’s a lot easier to get engineers to spend time developing new features than fill in a feature gap. Sergey Brin says he is now encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products instead of as stand-alone products. Former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider is quoted saying Yahoo!…

Panama is a bad code name

Yahoo’s stock declined 22% today after the company missed analysts’ quarterly estimates and announced its new advertising system, codenamed Panama, was delayed. I think of many failures when I hear the term “Panama” but the first thing that popped to mind in Yahoo’s case is Scotland and its Darien scheme. Towards the end of the 17th century Scotland realized it was falling behind the rest of Europe and undertook a few initiatives to modernize the country and better compete with the new economies of Europe. The Company of Scotland was created to establish new trade routes with Africa and the…

Taobao bridges online and offline retailing

Chinese online marketplace Taobao is lending its name to a new 12,000 square-foot shopping mall in Shanghai. Taobao, an eBay competitor with about twice the Chinese market share, will receive about $1.25 million a year for use of its name on the Taobao Cheng shopping center. About 300 retailers will be able to setup shops with broadband Internet access and discounted rent (about $22 a month) connected to their online storefront. Merchants can staff their brick and mortar store and fulfill orders placed online at the same time. Taobao is owned by Alibaba, which in turn is partially owned…

Yahoo! Local adds microformats

Yahoo! Local has added microformats support — including hCard, hReview, and hCal markup — to almost all of its business listings, search results, events, and reviews. The new markup allows parsers of Yahoo! Local pages such as web browsers and search engine to automatically recognize the structured contact, review, and calendar data present on Yahoo! Local pages. Yahoo! Local is an entry point for small businesses on the web. The new markup should help Yahoo! market its listing services as optimized for machines and humans, giving businesses optimal exposure for their extended listings. The new microformats markup on Yahoo!…

Flickr moving to San Francisco

Yahoo! is opening a big San Francisco office later this year and Flickr just announced they will be one of the teams making the move to the city. I know at least half of the Flickr team lives in San Francisco so it’s a healthy move for the group and will probably mean more time working on Flickr things! Flickr is the first Yahoo! team I’ve heard of moving into the San Francisco offices. It was previously rumored these would be ad sales offices but it’s good to see some product folk moving in. Tags: flickr…

Yahoo! unveils video sharing site, Finance redesign at analyst day

Yahoo! presented its business strategy to analysts yesterday and gave the world a sneak peek at what’s to come. A new advertising system is code complete and currently undergoing some testing and, if all goes well, will be rolled out later this year. Yahoo! plans to add advertising to it’s new “coming soon” video site. The webcast was not working for me this morning; all my notes below are based on the slide deck. Yahoo! Video The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well. The top navigation bar references “My…

Tetris using Yahoo! UI utilities

Yahoo! released the latest version of its UI utilities this week, including the components used in the new Yahoo! homepage design. You can use the various utilities to build your own website, but Dustin Diaz decided to build a version of Tetris. The game combines Yahoo’s Event Utility and DOM Collection utility to create some cross-browser brick busting action. One of the good things about releasing your code to the world is you never know just how people will use it. I doubt anyone at Yahoo! thought about gaming when they released the UI widgets but developers are resourceful!…

Flickr mutations and gamma rays

Flickr’s gone gamma with a new site design and functionality. The new site packs more links into less space using JavaScript menus. It looks like Organizr has been completely rewritten in JavaScript with no Flash required. The site also features a new search results page sorted by relevancy, recency, and interestingness. The search index contains photo titles, tags, and descriptions but not notes. You can search for groups of interest and people with a much cleaner result page. Tags: flickr…

Yahoo! My Headlines widget

Yahoo! released version 3.1 of its Widget Engine today including a new widget that displays the latest headlines from your My Yahoo! feeds. The new widget, Yahoo! My Headlines, allows you to see the latest headlines, source feed, and publish time of your My Yahoo! feed subscriptions….

Yahoo! CFO surrenders to Google

Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker recently told Bloomberg News Yahoo! does not intend to gain market share in the search space. “It’s not our goal to be #1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” (via Steve Rubel) Decker says Yahoo! will instead improve advertising on its search results pages to bring in more revenue. The comment may have been made on Decker’s appearance on Bloomberg Morning Call last week, but I have not been able to find the video. Yahoo!’s stock price is up about 2% this morning after a 20% slide…

Toni Schneider joins Automattic

Toni Schneider has left his position at Yahoo! to become CEO of Automattic, the corporate side of WordPress. Toni was previously leading Yahoo!’s API team and his move to Automattic comes less than a month about six months after his golden handcuffs came off from the Oddpost acquisition of June 2004. Om Malik broke the story of Tony’s departure this evening on his blog….

Yahoo search and Firefox

Yahoo! is not the default search engine for Firefox browser in the United States but they have specially coded their page to help users change their preference. When you first visit Yahoo.com a small box appears to help you switch from Google search to Yahoo! (as pictured above). Pretty smart! I’m surprised the other search engines bundled with Firefox such as Amazon and eBay have not done the same thing for their power users even if they cannot be a replacement for all things search. Tags: firefox…

Yahoo! Podcasts adds vidcasts

Yahoo! Podcasts now supports feeds with video content, or vidcasts. You can add a video series to your personal subscriptions, tag a vidcast, as well as rate and review vidcasts. Videos can be played inside your browser window using either Windows Media 9, RealPlayer 10, or QuickTime 7 players configured through a Yahoo! cookie. Eric Rice’s videoblog is one example listing. Even though the site now supports video all of the text and images on the site seemed focused on audio content. Audio content from the Yahoo! Podcast directory could be integrated with Yahoo! Music and hopefully vidcasts will make…

My Yahoo! feed API

Yahoo! has developed a backend infrastructure that can be easily deployed across various applications online or on the desktop with full synchronization and feed parsing handled on its servers. Developers could tap into the Yahoo! backend and develop new feed-aware applications quickly and easily on a robust platform already used by millions of users. Yahoo! just needs to publicize the code and make sessions a bit easier but I reverse engineered their code and I’ll give you a primer. Aggregator developers spend a lot of time dealing with issues such as proper parsing, feed storage, and at later stages…

Yahoo! launches podcast subscription center

Yahoo! just launched My Subscriptions, a new area on Yahoo! Podcasts where users can manage their subscribed podcasts and listen to these audio files online from their browser window. Users can also rate and review each podcast and its individual episodes. The online audio player uses the Windows Audio format and redirects the stream through Yahoo!’s servers allowing for some additional services as the middleman. I am currently on a high bandwidth connection and Yahoo! is offering me podcasts at 56 Kbps. Yahoo! passes the audio file location to a JavaScript file to create a new audio stream. Here is…

Yahoo Widget Engine

Yahoo! just released a new version of Konfabulator, now known as Yahoo! Widgets Engine. The new version includes new default widgets for Yahoo! search, maps, notepad, address book, and mail. Also included are improved widgets for Flickr, Yahoo! Photos, Calendar, Weather, and Finance. According to Toni Schneider of Yahoo! there have been 1.5 million downloads of Konfabulator since it was acquired by Yahoo! in August. Downloads are currently about 90% Windows, a low number considering Apple’s latest operating system features a very similar application, Dashboard, already built-in. 50-100 widgets are submitted to the widgets gallery every week. Yahoo! Widgets…

Yahoo! buys del.icio.us

Yahoo! has bought social bookmarking site del.icio.us for an undisclosed amount. Joshua Schachter posted an announcement to the del.icio.us blog and mentions Yahoo!’s ability to help del.icio.us scale and keep pace with it’s growing user base and site usage. Jeremy Zawodny welcomed the del.icio.us team on the Yahoo! Search blog and notes Yahoo! properties My Web and Flickr are natural matches for Joshua and del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is based in New York and received its first round of funding in April 2005 from a variety of investors including Amazon.com. The site now has about 300,000 registered users and 10 million…

Submit site feeds to Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search allows any user to submit a list of pages for submission in Yahoo!’s search index. You may submit site feeds to Yahoo! formatted as RSS 0.9, 1.0, or 2.0, Atom 0.3, or a text file with one URL per line. You can automate the process if you would like with just a few simple steps. Start with the base URL of http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request?pass=1&class=1. Parameters pass and class are required. Add a url parameter, setting the value to the URL-encoded location of your feed. Example: http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Ffeed.xml Submit via HTTP post. Sending a ping to blo.gs might eventually accomplish the same…

Wharton on Yahoo!

Professors from the Wharton School of Business analyzed Yahoo!’s many business lines in a recent article featured in Knowledge@Wharton. While Microsoft and Google duke it out Yahoo! may remain friendly to both and emerge a winner. Google is known for being good at search, and it is argued that while Yahoo! is certainly in a lot of different areas it is not a product leader. Most of the “Web 2.0” goodness mentioned in the article comes through acquisition of other small companies like Oddpost and Flickr that might be able to shake up a large media company. I think Yahoo!…

Yahoo! Blog Search

Yahoo! launched its blog search product tonight as a sub-property of Yahoo! News. Here is a results page on Yahoo! Blog Search for “Bush” for example. The content is also exposed on Yahoo! News Search result pages. Here is a results page on Yahoo! News search for “Bush” showing 4 results in the right sidebar. Yahoo! branded the new search as “Blog search” but it is obvious from the results that Yahoo! is currently focused on one file format: RSS. Every search result in my test searches includes a link to the source RSS feed. Yahoo! Search blog notes the…

Quotes from Terry Semel of Yahoo!

John Battelle interviewed Terry Semel this morning at Web 2.0. Below are some select quotes I found particularly interesting. If you look at Google as being more than search, “as a portal [Google] would probably be rated #4.” “So far [Google] seems to have no real plan, but maybe they do.” “We think the big change on the Internet is not just to get more and more unique users. As we go forward it’s more about a deeper experience, more time spent, and a deeper experience for users and advertisers.” Almost every session is mentioning Google even though there are…

Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org

Yahoo! just announced they have acquired events site Upcoming.org and the three-man team of Andy Baio, Gordon Luk, and Leonard Lin. Upcoming is an events message board for individuals and companies, providing a way to publicize and discover events. Upcoming has a database of venues supplied by users, tags for events, as well as information about what events its members are attending and watching. Upcoming recently added a groups feature to allow private events and recurring distribution lists. Upcoming and its team will be integrated with Yahoo! Local. Yahoo! Local has a database of venues complete with reviews and merchant…

Yahoo! leasing San Francisco office space

Yahoo! plans to lease 200,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco according to the San Francisco Business Times. The new office is located at 475 Sansome Street, near the landmark TransAmerica pyramid. Yahoo! currently has a HotJobs office in San Francisco and is currently hiring for two account executive positions. I wonder what teams will be located at this new location. I have thought about working at Yahoo! in the past but the commute to Sunnyvale is just too much for city dwellers like me or people living in Marin or the East Bay. 200,000 square feet holds…

Yahoo! quarterly numbers

Yahoo! announced quarterly results yesterday and gave us a peek at what’s been happening for the last 3 months. The Yahoo! Music service seemed to cause the most excitement among analysts on the conference call and Yahoo! plans to fully release the service by the end of September. Terry Semel said over half a million publishers are submitting feeds to My Yahoo! and over 4 million sites have “Add to My Yahoo!” buttons on their pages. He also mentioned the relevance of personal content producers using Flickr and blogs during the recent London bombings. Yahoo! had 3.14 billion average…

Yahoo! RSS Search

Yahoo!’s new RSS search site was introduced to the public domain this morning. Yahoo! RSS Search is no longer exposed outside the firewall so don’t be surprised if you are redirected to Yahoo! Search when you follow the aforementioned link. This early version of a future Yahoo! search component appeared to restrict searches of Yahoo! Search’s index to only include content published as a feed. I presume Yahoo! will use RSS as a generic term referring to feeds including RDF, RSS, and Atom. A search for “Niall Kennedy” returned 205 results on Yahoo! RSS Search compared to 565 results…

Yahoo! launches My Web 2.0 beta

Social search is here. Yahoo! introduced My Web 2.0 beta this evening, the first step towards personalized and social search online. I have been exploring the new service for the past half-hour and I am impressed. Personalized search and extending that search to a network of friends is an intensive computational operation and I am surprised Yahoo! has pulled it off. What can you do with My Web 2.0? Each search is limited to your saved bookmarks and the bookmarks of your friends my default. Every bookmark has an option for one or more tags and Yahoo! will suggest tags…

Yahoo! acquires blo.gs

Jim Winstead just announced Yahoo! has purchased blo.gs. The cloud interface will still be available for general use. What does this mean? Yahoo! now has a ping beacon that is already built-in to most weblog software as well as a database of blog posts from the past few years. The cloud technology allows Yahoo! to easily share content update notifications inside and outside the firewall, allowing for easy sharing between blo.gs and Yahoo! Search for example. Jim originally planned on pulling the cloud interface offline at the end of last year and it is good to see the continuation of…

Grokker visualizes Yahoo! Search using Java applet

Groxis, a data visualization company, converted its Grokker desktop software to a Java applet and is demonstrating the ability of its software using Yahoo! search results and advertisements. I tested it out with an ego search of course. I am able to see generalizations of how Yahoo! search users might view me based on the size of circles. You can adjust the starting date and number of search results through the tools on the bottom of your screen. Overall a very clever way to show off what Grokker’s technology can do for other data sets.

Yahoo! acquires Ludicorp and Flickr

has purchased Ludicorp and Flickr. “Pro account holders will get super mega bonuses, to be announced soon.”

Rumor: Yahoo! has purchased Flickr

supposedly purchased Flickr last week and will make an official announcement on March 1. I have heard similar chatter and frequent Flickr sightings on the Yahoo!

Yahoo! Slurp crawl delay

You can control the minimum delay between accesses for Yahoo!’s Slurp crawler by adding a “Crawl-delay” line to your robots.txt. User-agent: Slurp Crawl-delay: 20 Thank you Yahoo! Search Blog!…

Russell Beattie consulting Yahoo!

Russell Beattie will join Yahoo! on Monday as a consultant in corporate development and strategy. Congratulations, you held out and waited for something good to happen, and did a lot of thinking about what works best in your future. I commute from San Francisco to San Mateo every day, a bit short of Sunnyvale or I’d be up for a carpool. Yahoo! needs to compete with Google and get their own magic bus. My first thoughts? Russell needs a gadget budget so he can play with new phones, services, and operating systems….

Howard Dean Yahoo! Local advertisement

Yahoo! has a new advertisement for Yahoo! Local featuring Howard Dean (listen to the MP3). Howard Dean lists some of the states he visited on his book tour. (via Yahoo! Search blog)…

Terry Semel on acquisitions

Martha Lagace of HBS Working Knowledge summarized some of Yahoo! CEO Terry S. Semel’s experience with acquisitions. He talked about Yahoo!’s acquisitions of Overture and Inktomi, differing methods of negotiation, and knowing when to walk away when the deal gets too expensive. Semel spoke to members of the Harvard Business School Negotiation Club on September 20, 2004. [Inktomi] was scalable, and we also thought we could make it better by putting our engineering talent behind it. I knew as a negotiator—and my team knew—that we had to have this….

Yahoo! web services wishlist

Jeremy asks about web services I would like to Yahoo! offer. How about being the my online storage and synchronization center? I could add an entry to my OS X address book and the entry is reflected in my Yahoo! Address Book. I could easily add photos to Yahoo! Photos from my desktop. Notepad becomes a general note center and I can even download the contents to an iPod. Briefcase can store some documents. Yahoo! makes money by selling extra storage….

Yahoo! Search blog

Yahoo! now has their own search blog. It is powered by Movable Type. Jeremy Zawodny has some more information as well. Jeff Weiner, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search, has the first post. Comment threads are open. They even link to the Google Blog….

Yahoo! Maps SmartView service

Yahoo! launched a new Yahoo! Maps service today, incoprating new localized content. “The SmartView service lets surfers use the Yahoo Maps section of the company’s Web site to view information on local points of interest, such as restaurants, hotels, parks, automatic teller machines and post offices.”…

Yahoo! Search lists RSS feeds

Yahoo! Search locates RSS alongside the Web page results. A search for Dave Winer allows you to view Scripting News’ RSS feed as XML, or add to My Yahoo!. I do not have the same luck with my feed….

Yahoo! Slurp

Yahoo! dumped Google yesterday and started using a new crawler, Yahoo! Slurp. Maximum index size is now 500K and includes PDF and Microsoft Office documents. Personalization is next….

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