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! 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! 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…
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…
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 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 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! 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! 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…
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…
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…
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…
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!…
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…
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 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!…
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! 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…
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.
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! 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! 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 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! 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 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…
