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
Buzzword
kitty

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
Buzzword
kitty

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
Buzzword
kitty

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 service
Fire 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.

THANKS!
http://developer.yahoo.com
Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | twitter: codepo8