Yahoo opens up members' data to external developers
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. has introduced a mechanism for external developers to give their Web applications access to data that Yahoo members have stored in Yahoo services. Yahoo made available the protocol that provides this bridge, called Browser Based Authentication, on Friday, and works with two Yahoo services -- Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Photos -- with support for other services planned for the next few months. The protocol requires that users give their authorization prior to giving third-party Web applications access to their Yahoo data. Developers also need to register their applications with Yahoo. The idea behind Browser Based Authentication is to extend the popular "mashups" of Yahoo Web services with external applications by bringing personal user data, like stored e-mail messages and photos, into the mix. Providing access to this data will allow Yahoo members to use external Web applications in ways that haven't been possible yet. Until now, this data has been kept out of the reach of non-Yahoo developers. For example, external developers now can write applications that let Yahoo users perform actions on their e-mail messages or photos that Yahoo hasn't come up with. Yahoo wants to tap into the creativity of external developers who can broaden the scope of tools, applications and features available for its online services. More information can be found here.
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Since the recent release of a new tool from Yahoo! - Yahoo! Pipes - developers have been working with it and creating their own "pipes" of functionality, already exploring the boundaries of the application. Clay Loveless is one PHP developer that has already created his own pipe to monitor feeds from several PHP extensions.   The first pipe I've created and published is the PHP Extension Monitor. It's an aggregated feed that pulls in release information on several cool extensions that arenât announced in the PECL feed, such as Suhosin, XCache and DBXML.   Check out his pipe here or you can go create your own by logging in with a Yahoo! ID here.
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Yahoo is making APIs available to developers who want to build applications for its new Panama search ad platform.
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There will be platform independence, this time Yahoo! has announced its intention to support third-party widgets on its mobile platform, promising platform independence and rapid development. The announcement came in a presentation at the CES event, currently taking place in Las Vegas.â¦
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UPDATE: Yahoo user names and passwords can soon be used to access Web sites that support the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework.
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Web giant Yahoo opens up the core code for its e-mail reader to coding community.
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Yahoo has quietly expanded its local business listings and rolled out a service that gives businesses control over their listings in Yahoo Local through a new paid inclusion program.
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Yahoo is working on a mobile service called oneConnect designed to aggregate contacts and communications around what it calls a &quot;socially connected address book.&quot;The service, due to launch in the second quarter this year, will be open and other companies are free to join, Yahoo said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.OneConnect draws information from social-networking sites such as MySpace, instant-messaging services such as Yahoo Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, and e-mail services including Yahoo Mail and Google&#39;s Gmail to build a picture of the mood, location, and activities of friends and colleagues.It also stores details of recent communications with address-book contacts, including instant-messaging and e-mail exchanges. All the information held about a person can be viewed on a &quot;social contact card.&quot;Location data is calculated by GPS (Global Positioning System) in handsets that have it, or deduced from nearby cell tower locations. Users of the service can keep their locations private, or opt to share that information with others.Combining all the information gathered by the service allows Yahoo to alert users of the service when friends arrive in town, or to let them follow up on unfinished business when colleagues become available.&quot;I can see all my communications archives so when someone comes up to me, I know whether I answered his last e-mail,&quot; said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo&#39;s Connected Life division, who demonstrated the service at an MWC news conference.Yahoo oneConnect is built on the same widget platform that Yahoo used for its oneSearch mobile search service, so it will work on some 300 phones, either in a browser, as a Java applet or as a native application.Boerries demonstrated how oneConnect can extract information about the status and activities of members of a social network on other services such as MySpace.With some of those services, he said, Yahoo developed the code to exchange the information, while other partners chose to develop the bridge themselves.&quot;We don&#39;t want to be competing to build a better Facebook client,&quot; he said.In one case, though, the intervention of a neutral party was necessary to get both sides talking. Although oneConnect can collect information from Microsoft Exchange e-mail accounts, the connector was written by Dataviz, a third-party software developer specializing in data translation. Microsoft recently made an unsolicited offer to purchase Yahoo, and the two companies are engaged in a war of words over the value of the bid, which may turn hostile.Opening up the social network to other services will allow Yahoo to bulk up in its battle with Google for the attention of Internet users. But Google is also a potential partner for the service: the beta version of oneConnect gathers information from Google Talk and Gmail.The service sends large amounts of data to and from the mobile phone -- the demonstration paused often with a message indicating that data was being exchanged. While unlimited data services are common in the U.S., they are less so in Europe, making the service potentially expensive to use.Boerries acknowledged that data rates could be a problem, adding that Yahoo is negotiating with operator partners to introduce all-inclusive data tariffs for the service.In return, those partners could benefit from a share of the advertising revenue generated by Yahoo&#39;s online services, he said.To conclude his demonstration, Boerries announced &quot;one more thing,&quot; acknowledging that he had stolen the line from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.That thing was an iPhone running oneConnect as a native application, linked to contact information in the iPhone address book.&quot;It&#39;s a prototype, because there is no SDK [software development kit]. We had some eager developers who used Jailbreak to open up the iPhone,&quot; Boerries said, referring to the way in which iPhones must be hacked if they are to run applications not approved by Apple. Jobs has said an SDK will be made available to would-be iPhone application developers later this month.
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.
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(InfoWorld) - EBay plans to increase the programming tools it provides external developers so that they will be able to increase the volume and variety of applications they create for the company's marketplace. The San Jose, California, company will release new SDKs (software development kits) and provide more technical resources to its community of third-party developers. It will also release new APIs (application programming interfaces) designed to create applications for eBay buyers specifically. The eBay Developers Program has about 45,000 members. In recent years, large Internet companies like Google, eBay, AOL, and Yahoo have courted external developers aggressively. Given the necessary tools, these programmers can create plug-ins, applications, and extensions that enhance the Internet companies' services and boost their popularity and usage. Because they are built to work in conjunction with features and data from another company's online service, these external applications are commonly referred to as "mashups." The developer news was announced by Max Mancini, eBay's senior director of platform and innovation, in a posting to the eBay Developers Program official blog on Tuesday. Mancini didn't indicate when these new tools will become available, nor did he provide many details about their functionality. EBay didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Mancini, whose appointment as leader of the eBay Developers Program was also announced Tuesday, also oversees a new eBay team charged with fostering innovation. The so-called Disruptive Innovation team was created to "explore new concepts and create new tools to allow our 222 million buyers, sellers and developers to make better use of the eBay platform," Mancini wrote. This innovation group will work closely with the developers program. Previously, Mancini led eBay product development teams in areas such as trust and safety, customer support and stores.
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By Brian Bergstein  IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are teaming up to offer a free data- search tool for businesses, a quirky move challenging Google Inc. and other corporate-search specialists in a blossoming market.
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A new standard aims to help users pass information between Web services without sharing full access to their identities.
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(InfoWorld) - Valentine's Day is months away, but Google displayed its ardor for developers by delivering to them this week a programming equivalent of a box of chocolates and a dozen red roses. With several new and upgraded programming tools, Google continued it courtship of external developers, a group it considers key for the successful adoption of its online services. The new toolsÂ make it easier for developers to access functions in Google's search engines, Base repository of product listings and lightweight 'gadget' Web applications. Google also introduced aÂ search engine tuned to find publicly available source code. Despite its size and might, Google believes that it benefits greatly from allowing programmers that aren't on its staff to build Web applications that use Google services and data. These can be hobbyists, professional programmers or corporate developers. These external coders often come up with applications, plug-ins and Web sites that extend and enhance Google services in ways that Google staffers don't think of. For example, Google Maps has become the core to myriad "mashups" from external developers. Other large Internet companies that woo external programmers with incentives and tools include Yahoo Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc., all for similar reasons behind Google's outreach efforts. This week, Google upgraded its AJAX Search API (application programming interface), designed to simplify adding a search box to a site and displaying results without taking users to a separate page. The API also allows the creation of applications that use Google search functions. Meanwhile, Google also created a new utility that automatically feeds inventory data to Google Base from stores hosted by Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc. and Yahoo Inc. on their respective e-commerce platforms. This new Store Connector is designed to save online store developers from manually entering their product listings into Google Base. Products listed on Google Base can appear in Google.com search results, with a link to the store selling them. Another overture toward external developers this week was the release of almost 1,300 'gadget' mini-applications for use in non-Google Web sites. Previously, they could only be used in Google sites. In addition to benefiting site publishers, the wider availability of these gadgets will provide more exposure for external developers who have created them. Finally, Google unveiled a new search engine intended to simplify the often tedious and time-consuming task ofÂ finding source code online. Unlike the Google.com Web search engine, this one crawls deeply into program files and returns snippets from lines of code with links to the file they belong to.
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Yahoo appears close to implementing OpenID, a Web authentication standard that relieves people of the need to remember multiple passwords to log into different Web sites.
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IBM, Google, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo have joined the corporate board of the OpenID Foundation, giving a boost to the groupâs efforts to simplify the process of signing into Web sites.
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Yahoo Inc.  is  set to allow outsiders to create new services using the world's  most popular consumer e-mail program, in the broadest move the  Web has yet seen to enlist independent programmers to build a  company's products for it.
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.