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…
Category Archives: Web development
Microsoft awards three Windows Live MVPs
Microsoft has awarded three web developers with its Most Valuable Professional status. The MVP program is Microsoft’s way of recognizing the work and contributions of independent developers and these individuals are rewarded with a fast-track to product feedback teams among other benefits. The first three awards include a consultant in Australia who maintains the Via Virtual Earth community and a consultant in Washington D.C. who creates Microsoft gadgets. Recognition of independent third party developers and community leaders will play a significant role in the rollout of web as a platform strategies from big Internet companies. How do you reward…
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…
NewsGator syncs Windows RSS platform into its cloud
NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop Sync in beta. The Windows application sits in your desktop tray and keeps your feeds, folders, and item read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. NewsGator Online may be viewed in a web browser or synchronized to your mobile phone, Mac, Windows Media Center, or other applications hooked into NewsGator Online. NewsGator Desktop sync connects Windows PCs running the Windows RSS Platform present in Internet 7 and above. Synchronization is like a personal teleporter for your feed data, breaking up your data into many tiny bits capable of being reassembled wherever…
Adobe introduces online photo and video sharing
Adobe will bundle online photo and video sharing into the latest versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Photoshop Showcase site will be powered by Flash of course, and includes support for geotagging photographs (U.S. only), tagging, creating easily shared albums, and sending your photos to a digital picture frame or photo printer. Adobe views a photo, video, or gallery as one “share.” The fist 1,000 shares are free and users can upgrade to 5,000 shares for $3.99 or unlimited shares for $7.99. I have not seen many details released about the Photoshop Showcase product’s online presence, but…
Facebook Developer API
Social networking site Facebook has opened up access to its service via a set of RESTian APIs, giving developers access to a user’s profile data, friend list, inbox, calendar, photos, blog posts, and more. The API could be used to create a desktop or mobile version of a user’s Facebook data or easily migrate them to a new social network, photo site, or calendar. (via GigaOm) Web applications are limited to 100,000 requests a day and desktop applications are restricted to 5 requests per second….
Flash 9 and the MySpace effect
Adobe released version 9 of its popular Flash player in June, boasting 10x performance increases and a variety of new video, audio, and security filters. MySpace worked with Adobe on new security settings for Flash embeds on its sites and required its members upgrade to the new plugin version for access to Flash content on the site. The new player release combined with the MySpace required upgrade created a lot of confusion around the future of embedded widgets on MySpace and other popular web properties. I spoke with Emmy Huang, senior product manager of the Flash 9 plugin at…
Rasmus Lerdorf on scaling web apps with PHP
Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus’s talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row. Rich web applications make better use of browser user interfaces through the use of less visible round-trips to the server (through AJAX or other methods). These new…
MySpace upgrades to Flash 9
MySpace recently required all widgets upgrade to Flash Player 9 (ActionScript 3) and disable internal links.
The Widgetization of the Web
Widgets are taking over the web, small pieces at a time. Big web destinations are opening their templates to custom configurations by users and pre-configurations with special partners. Mix and match your favorite content from around the web on your personal start page from Microsoft, Google, or Netvibes. Share a few live and always updating bits of information in your blog sidebar using widgets on WordPress or TypePad. Small(er) businesses can leverage the huge distributions of users across most of the top web properties. Over half of the top Internet companies for home users currently open up their pages for…