Extend Your Publishing Reach with JS-Kit + Yahoo! Updates (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

My Projects
Tools & Services
APIs and Services
- Flickr
- Geo
- Mail
- Search
- Social
- Updates
- YAP
- YQL
Developer Tools
- Hadoop
- YUI
- YSlow
- View all »
Resources
- Blog
- YDN Theater
- Hack U

YDN YDN Blog Extend Your Publishing Reach with JS-Kit + Yahoo! Updates

Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

March 3, 2009

Extend Your Publishing Reach with JS-Kit + Yahoo! Updates

Today, we're excited to announce a collaboration between Yahoo! and JS-Kit, a leading distributed social network connecting more than 600,000 sites across the Web, including AOL, Evite, Experian, JetBlue, Sun Microsystems, and WorldNow. Through this integration, JS-Kit is making it easy for their vast network of publishers to benefit from the power of Yahoo! Updates. Eventually, each story a publisher sends to the Yahoo! Updates feed will benefit from referral traffic to Yahoo!'s most popular sites: Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, and more.

According to JS-Kit CEO, Khris Loux, "JS-Kit is excited to be working with Yahoo! to add this new functionality for our publishers. By leveraging Yahoo!'s Social Directory API and Updates API we're giving our customers a powerful way to improve the user experience of their communities and sites, as well as to tap into Yahoo!'s global audience." JS-Kit’s Comments widget now lets users publish stories to their Yahoo! Updates feed and bring their Yahoo! identity with them on various sites. The updates feed will be displayed on many of Yahoo!'s most popular pages and shared with users' friend connections on Yahoo!.

Here's how it works: Integration with the Social Directory API allows JS-Kit to display a user’s Yahoo! nickname and avatar picture on the site. Integration with the Updates API allows JS-Kit to publish an item to the Yahoo! Updates feed when a user adds a comment to a web site powered by JS-Kit. At all times, your users remain in control of their data by leveraging OAuth to broker data access between Yahoo! and JS-Kit.

Yahoo! Updates allow publishers (and publishing partners like JS-Kit), to syndicate user-generated actions (ratings, reviews, comments, favorites, and uploads) to Yahoo!'s massive global distribution network. In the coming months, as Updates are implemented across Yahoo!, publishers will enjoy referral traffic back to their sites from across the Yahoo! Network (more than 500M+ monthly unique visitors).

To learn more about how the Yahoo! Open Strategy extends your reach as a publisher, visit the Updates API page. You can also check out JS-Kit's integration, live on all sites powered by JS-Kit Comments widgets, including Guy Kawasaki, Sun Microsystems, and WorldNow.

Greg Cohn
Director, Business Development
Yahoo! Open Strategy

Posted at March 3, 2009 3:29 PM | Permalink

Bookmark this on Delicious

Comments

liked the way yahoo! is fetching updates from web and sending traffic back to publishers.
But if it comes to the integration with websites. facebook seems to be clear winner. their repo, brand is all which keeps them ahead. If it was Yahoo! or something like that then it would have been bigger brand but JS-Kit doesn't seem to work like that.
Also facebook friend connect provides seamless integration with the websites. No popups windows from the publishers' site if you select friend connect to log in. while if you select yahoo! login from js-kit, it will popup a new window and will take to yahoo's login page.

Posted by: rahul agarwal at March 5, 2009 9:16 AM

I heard Lectures at IBM and Oracle here in Israel about Social Networking and I am wondering how my Small Business could benefit instead of wasting 25 hours a day on well known Social Networks or going in to an advertising war on a well known Search Site.
Hope Yahoo moves ahead and continues with OS Independance. I am wrtiting this on Kubuntu Linux and Firefox.

Posted by: Samuel Cohen at March 6, 2009 1:58 PM

@rahul - thanks for the comment. We do offer developers the ability to integrate directly with Yahoo! APIs, and we offer a lot of openness and flexibility in how they do that. JS-Kit is simply another way publishers can implement. For some, it may be an easier integration to commenting and other tools, and we're all about giving partners freedom of choice.

With respect to login flows, there's always a tradeoff in these things. We've tried to make it a good partner experience, but our first priority is and always will be to make sure our users understand what's going on clearly, and that their information is secure.

Posted by: Greg Cohn at March 6, 2009 2:36 PM

Cool stuff.

Posted by: John at May 29, 2009 12:03 PM