Opening up Yahoo! to Users and Developers

Christian Heilmann

Future of Web Apps, London,

!Neal

I’m Chris.

Neil is well clever about the Yahoo Open Strategy

I am just well excited about it.

So Neal’s talk was all like:

My approach is different.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mathias-erhart/761601969/

The Yahoo Open Strategy has three goals:

1. Make Yahoo more social

2. Open to third parties like never before

3. Rewire Yahoo

But how, do tell?

Let’s go a back in time a bit...

Yahoo = big old internet company

But they already started getting people in that dared

to think differently.

(No, nothing to do with fruit)

Who still innovate, hard!

http://www.flickr.com/explore/panda

Amongst other things, these companies showed Yahoo the

impact of APIs and distribution.

Hence we went nuts on giving you APIs:

Another thing we took on very early is the need for

different formats:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hamsters

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=hamsters&lang=en-us&format=atom

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=hamsters&lang=en-us&format=php

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=hamsters&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=icanhaz

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=hamsters&lang=en-us&format=lol

My first job inside Yahoo was related to another new

product:

Answers tapped into the wisdom of the masses to help

another and not solely rely on expert advice.

£1 for the

Buzzwordkitty

We came to understand very fast that with the right products and the right

channels we can get a lot of cool content.

Content from our users for our users.

You could call it user generated content (UGC).

£1 for the

Buzzwordkitty

We also found that people do awesome things with the data

provided through APIs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mn_francis/294430002/

However, mixing those with the Yahoo sites as they were was harder than we thought.

The other thing we came to understand is that mashing up

data can be tricky (read: annoying)

Hence:

One common request:

CLI? KTHXBAI!

This is what you will get with YOS.

It is called Yahoo Query Language (YQL) and you can

download the docs at:http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

SELECT * from web.search WHERE query="puppies" LIMIT

3 OFFSET 10

Yahoo as your Database :)

But what about the social graph?

£1 for the

Buzzwordkitty

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crumley/160490011/

Yes, there’s a full social API, at /social/

Yahoo has *a lot* of users and we will do our best to get

them connected and understand the benefits of

social networking.

Ok, we have data, we have users and their connections.

So what do we have delivered so far?

Address Book: access and update contacts

BOSS: build your own search serviceFire Eagle: create location-aware applications and services

GeoPlanet: manage all geo-permanent named places on Earth

Music: use the Yahoo! Music catalog of artists, albums, videos, and more

SearchMonkey: use structured data to enhance your Yahoo! Search results

What’s coming?

YAP – Yahoo Application Platform.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yap/

YAP will make it easy for you to build applications for the

Yahoo framework.

It’ll allow you to write the code, get the data, promote

and place your apps.

It’ll be something like Searchmonkey allows you to

do now.

It’ll allow you to write the code, get the data, promote

and place your apps

It’ll allow you to write the code, get the data, promote

and place your apps

Building apps – woo!

But where to put them?

My Yahoo! – Opened

Yahoo! homepage – Opened

Mail – Opened

Media properties – Opened

Yeah, OK, what about the open?

Open Social

OpenID

oAuth

open bar

So, is this coming?

Yeah.

Is it going to be cool?

Reaching millions of people with my apps – yeah I think so.

Does answering your own questions make you look

pretentious?

Yes, it does. Stop it now.

http://developer.yahoo.com

Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | twitter: codepo8

THANKS!