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Want to see how many links your site is getting from Yahoo! Search? Try out the new Site Explorer Badge, just pushed live today from Yahoo! Search. The Site Explorer badge queries the Inlink Data method of the Site Explorer API, wraps the result in a callback, and shows it inline on your site, without requiring any extra bandwidth from your server. The example code is short and sweet, and provides an excellent Hello World example for those who are just getting started in the wonderful world of badge design.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 10:34 AM | Comments (3)
New from the Yahoo! Widgets team: The Ever-Changing Widget Landscape. As noted by the inestimable Mr. Arrington, it's an unbiased, unblushing overview of the various widget (and widget-flavored) platforms out there, including Yahoo! Widgets, Apple's Dashboard Widgets, Microsoft's Vista Sidebar, and Google's Desktop Gadgets.
Pointers from comments include Adobe's Apollo and AOL's Boxely, which looks to be a very nice combination of in-browser and on-desktop environments. It's always great to see those comments, both here and on other developer sites ... keep 'em coming!
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
Whether it's a clock or a fuzzy little chumby, we love it when someone uses our APIs to make something novel.
It comes as no surprise that the latest hack to come across the YDN radar is from one of our favorite hackers: Simon Willison. In idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID he describes what he's built. But if you've played around with BBAuth before, you can probably guess how it works already. :-)
Yup, idproxy.net serves as a bridge from BBAuth to OpenID. Not only that, it offers your own name in idproxy.net DNS space (I claimed jzawodn.idproxy.net, for example) and an anti-phising monster.
Well done, Simon.
Posted by jzawodn at 7:31 AM | Comments (0)
The Yahoo! UI Library team has an increasingly robust video section of the web site called the YUI Theater. It includes presentations from JSON inventor Douglas Crockford, YUI engineer Matt Sweeney, Oddpost cofounder Iain Lamb and several others on topics such as "The New Hacker's Toolkit", "An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM" and "Applying Ajax: Speeding the Journey from Idea to Information".
On the heels of launching v1.0 of Firebug, a handy Firefox extension for working with front end code, author Joe Hewitt visited Yahoo! to give a power-user demo. The YUI team captured the talk on video, uploaded it to the YUI Theater, and now we can all get the tour. Here it is below:
There's also a growing YUI Library MyBlogLog community forming. You can join that here.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)
If you've ever loaned money to roommates and friends, then you know the true meaning of the old saying: payback is a . . . well, let's just say it isn't always easy to figure out who owes what to whom. Even when you are a well-intentioned borrower, things can get confusing -- a dollar here, a third of the rent there, half of the week's groceries. . the list goes on. Ashwin Bharambe, Amit Manjhi, and Shashank Pandit (all computer science students in the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon) 
started Buxfer (think "bucks" and "transfer") to add some method to the borrowing-and-lending madness within their own circle of friends. Buxfer started out as a script that Ashwin wrote for his own use, but after making lots of copies of the script for friends, the team thought they could do something bigger.
The result was a single web-based application that makes tracking shared bills and expenses very simple. Launched in late September 2006, Buxfer has over 9,000 users and has tracked over 15,000 total transactions totaling about $3M (The team is working on the ability to do the actual transactions -- stay tuned.) To make it even simpler to get started in the system, they leveraged Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) to allow their users who already have Yahoo! IDs to log in and get down to business immediately.
To review, BBAuth makes it possible for applications that you build to use data stored by users at Yahoo! (with their explicit permission, of course). Yahoo! currently has 208 MILLION registered Yahoo! users, so the benefits of building BBAuth-powered applications are huge. Back in October, Matt McAlister and Dan Thuerer produced a screencast that runs through some of the finer details, so be sure to check it out.
The Buxfer team's experience demonstrates the power of BBAuth in a nascent startup where getting new users is key. For the Buxfer team, implementing BBAuth was a simple way for them to serve users with Yahoo! IDs by allowing them to experience the site without the hassle of new registration -- just enter your Yahoo! credentials, and you're in the system. It's not surprising to us then that BBAuth is the most popular third-party login option for Buxfer, and as the folks at Menuism (another BBAuth-powered startup we're proud of) said on their blog: "it's easy as pie" to put in place (almost 70% of Menuism's new signups use BBAuth!)
From an implementation standpoint, the team told me that BBAuth was very easy to roll out in their PHP-based environment with the help of the BBAuth Quickstart Package that we provide, which includes classes for PHP4 and PHP5. (For you Rails fans out there, Cameron Walters at Rubyred Labs built a plugin that he used at our Open Hack Day -- check it out!)
The Buxfer story is really just in the opening chapters. Until December, the team was building Buxfer in their spare time, but they recently incorporated and received funding from Paul Graham's YCombinator as part of their winter round of funding. Ashwin, Shashank, and Amit are are going to take a leave from their Ph.D. programs to work full-time on Buxfer. Congrats, guys!
If you want to make it easier for the vast universe of registered Yahoo! users to use your web application and chase the dream of building your own startup, BBAuth is clearly an accelerator -- and we want you to step on the gas. Get started with BBAuth today and let us know about your experience and what features you would like for us to include in the comments.
- Chad Dickerson
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 10:00 AM | Comments (2)
In Part II of the interview with Joyce Park and Adam Rifkin, the Renkoo founders share details about their backend tools and share some thoughts on Yahoo!'s role as a startup enabler. Here are some excerpts, and the screencast of the interview is below:
On the Renkoo technology stack...
"The main framework is LAMP. The realtime part is a technology my partner Adam Rifkin and I are working on called mod_pubsub, an open source project. And Comet server. The UI is the Dojo AJAX server. Mod_pubsub is written in Twisted Python."
On Yahoo! as a startup enabler...
"It would have been impossible to build without Yahoo! APIs. There's just a wealth of data that takes tremendous sophistication to put together that only a company of your size would have the resources to do. For a company of our size, even a buddy icon maker would be a suck on our time.Everybody has the same data, so the question is what do you add to the data? Our UI is unique. We put a lot of thought into how to expose the different parts of the data and using it differently."
On privacy and openness...
"I would love to let people export all of their social invitations. It's an interesting situation because due to the nature of the data it's not just private to you. You could be violating your friends' privacy. With anything where you might be potentially violating someone else's privacy, our legal position isn't exactly clear.Do you want your whole social schedule available to anyone with an RSS reader or a web browser?"
On hiring at Renkoo...
"We're looking for sr backend dev(s), a front end dev, an interaction designer, but NO product managers!" Link: Renkoo jobs page
To post this video on your web site, use the following embed code:
You can also get Part I of the interview here. Joyce walked us through a demo of Renkoo.com and explained which Yahoo! services they were leveraging for their product.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 9:56 AM | Comments (2)
Planning a move? Got school-aged kids? You're about to bump up against a major headache: finding a home in a neighborhood with the best possible schools. Thanks to YDN, Local Search, and Yahoo! Real Estate, however, life just got a little bit easier.
Yahoo! Real Estate yesterday launched a new nationwide school search feature that allows readers to search and browse schools using a map interface, as well as refine and sort by district, distance, grade level, or school type, public, private, or charter. Y!RE partnered with leading non-profit GreatSchools.net for detailed school information, statistics, parent reviews, and links to test scores and related content on the Y! Education/GreatSchools site.
To give users an even better feel for the neighborhood, each school detail page features a neighborhood map that uses the Yahoo! Local API to plot nearby grocery stores, parks, restaurants and other local businesses with user ratings.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 9:57 AM | Comments (1)
Joyce Park and Adam Rifkin came to Yahoo! to walk us through the various ways they have used Yahoo! technologies to build their product. They've integrated several services ranging from flickr buddy icons to maps to local search to IM and more.
In Part I of the interview, a 12 minute screencast, Joyce gives a demo of the product and shares some interesting insights on the way people are using Renkoo. There are some surprising differences between the way men and women plan meetups.
To post this video on your web site, use the following embed code:
UPDATE: You can now see Part II of the Renkoo interview.
Matt McAlister
Posted by Matt McAlister at 2:04 PM | Comments (0)
What happens if you automatically extract information from Flickr's geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? It opens a window to explore the entire world through the eyes of the users of Flickr.
The World Explorer uses public geotagged photos contributed to the world by the Flickr community, automatically extracts the tags that are relevant and representative for each map region or zoom level and connects these tags to the photos that represent that area.
The best thing about it? The World Explorer is build on top of open APIs. It uses two main components. The TagMaps, a Flash/SWF object that visualizes tags (i.e., text terms) on a map and the open APIs.
You can use the data APIs to get Flickr tags of any location, roll your own TagMaps based on a custom geoRSS data feed or create a badge for your blog, MySpace page or any other page that you want to pimp up.
This embedded element is set to take you to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park.
Mor from the Yahoo! Research Berkeley team covers the World Explorer in his detailed blog post.
A huge 'thank you' to all the Flickr users that generated the underlying data! Happy Mashing!
Dan Theurer
Posted by dantheurer at 10:05 AM | Comments (2)
Pssst. See that little widget over there on the right?
That's you.
Well, it is if you're a MyBlogLog user. Sign up and see your own face on more and more of the sites you visit. And if you have a site of you own, you can use a similar badge (they come in several shapes and sizes) to let your readers discover each other too.
That's right, the news is out. MyBlogLog is now part of the Yahoo! Developer Network.
We'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming weeks, but 2007 is looking to be a very interesting year. The fact that MyBlogLog is part of YDN should provide a hint or two... :-)
Posted by jzawodn at 10:07 PM | Comments (8)
If you missed it last week (even on Boing Boing), we were all amused and impressed to see our Weather API being used in an old school clock.
I used a fake antique (replica) that I picked up for cheap on ebay. I took out the clock work, and replaced it with a servo and used a phidgets USB - servo controller so I could control the servo from my computer. I had to use some gears so that the needle shaft would turn 360 degrees, since the servo only turns about 180. I also re-designed the face of the clock keeping a similar look to the original time piece. Once that was all set I created a little flash application that would connect to yahoo! weather service, and update the servo. I made it so it could toggle between current condition and the local forecast, and also made it so I could enter another zip code to see what the weather is in other places.
Gotta love those API hacks that involved hardware.
My only question is... Where can I buy one?!
Posted by jzawodn at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
In response to many, many requests from the developer community, we've opened up our own tiny corner of suggestions.yahoo.com, right alongside the Autos and TV suggestion areas. Please feel free to throw in questions, comments, suggestions, enhancement requests, bug reports, or any other feedback item your little heart desires, as long as it pertains to the Yahoo! Developer Network.
The Suggestion Box also allows interested readers to leave comments or digg vote for suggestions they like; please do use these features, so we know what's on everybody's mind.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 1:25 PM | Comments (8)
Here--courtesy Upcoming.org, which we strongly recommend--is a quick snapshot of where we'll be speaking in public over the next few months:
We'd love to meet you; please look us up if you're in town for any of these. We'd also be very happy to discuss appearing at your local event if you're looking for a speaker; please leave a comment if you'd like us to get in touch.
Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network
Posted by Kent Brewster at 2:18 PM | Comments (1)
Now that 2007 is here, it seems like a good time to think about the next 360 days or so. It's not that we don't have any plans for this new year, but we don't always know about the burning need you have for a new API, feature, function, tutorial, etc.
So, what would you like to see from the Yahoo! Developer Network in 2007?
Drop a comment below. We'd love to know what's on your wish list.
Posted by jzawodn at 8:11 AM | Comments (40)
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