Yahoo Twitts

Yahoo has a twitter account, twitter/yahoo and so does a whole bunch of people, entities from Yahoo. All of them are invading Twitter. Is it a prequel to what?
Pehaps it was due to this PEW report that says 11% of Americans used service similar to twitter.

Tags: Yahoo, twitter, PEW report

Tweetnews! Twitter Authorized Yahoo News!

Determining how fresh and relevant the news are a question to news publishing sites. Sorting them by time has been the initial method with some other authorization schema has brought us the fresh and relevant news to us.
But Yahoo developer Vik Singh has seen that perhaps binding the time stamped Yahoo news articles with Twitter and order them by the number of tweets, Tweetnews, could be of a better relevance. Yes, they seem to be. I did a few searches and was happy with the results. (Above is a search on Israel on Tweetnews and at the bottom is the same done on Yahoo News at the same time.)
Vik has written a very good blog post on the suject and sums ip up as "To sum up, the contributions of this service are: (1) Real-time search + freshness (2) Stitching social commentary to authoritative sources of information (3) Another (hopefully cool) BOSS example."

Tags: twitter, tweetnews, Yahoo, Vik Singh, BOSS, Google APP Engine

New Open, Social Features in Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo! and Yahoo!

Following up on a promise made earlier this year, Yahoo's commitment to re-wire Yahoo!, Yahoo is adding social functionality across the Yahoo! network. They also inviting and opening up to integrate content and services from third-party developers and publishers.

Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) into Yahoo!'s market-leading products will help users keep up with the information and people they care about most, creating a more socially relevant Web experience. Today, Yahoo! is announced some consumer product updates that demonstrate the progress, including:

• Yahoo! Mail - Announced separately today,Yahoo! Mail's smarter inbox focuses on streamlining access to a user's most relevant and useful information. The new Welcome Page surfaces email messages, information and activity from people users care about most, and the integration of relevant third party applications will allow users to be more productive, all from within their inbox. The Yahoo! Mail smarter inbox is the company's largest-scale implementation of the Y!OS initiative to-date.
• My Yahoo! - Beginning today, My Yahoo! users can enhance their personal start pages by adding applications created by third-party developers. Built using the Yahoo! Application Platform, these interactive "apps" will range from productivity tools to games, and will infuse My Yahoo! with new social relevance. Also being launched today, a new My Yahoo! Theme API lets third-party designers create and share their own look and feel for My Yahoo! pages, giving users access to an even wider range of creative backgrounds and styles.
• Yahoo! Toolbar - Available for a sneak preview later this week at toolbar.yahoo.com, the new Yahoo! Toolbar will provide constant access to essential online tasks and up-to-the-minute news from the sources that matter most. Features of the new Toolbar that will rollout to users next year include:
  • Apps for checking new emails from Yahoo! and other popular Web-based email providers, monitoring or searching for items on eBay, and finding local movie showtimes.
  • Alerts that notify a user about Updates from their personal connections - including their friends' recent activity across the Yahoo! network and eventually, elsewhere on the Web.
  • Personal search suggestions that surface the sites a user has visited and provide vertical search results directly from the Toolbar.
• Yahoo! Updates - In addition to surfacing friend updates in the new Yahoo! Toolbar and Mail, Yahoo! will begin sharing relevant updates within Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! TV. Yahoo! Updates enable Yahoo! users to have visibility into the online activities of their connections across the Yahoo! network, such as a recently Buzzed article, a hotel review in Yahoo! Travel, adding a new app to My Yahoo!, or a rating on Yahoo! TV. Earlier this fall, Yahoo! began displaying activity updates in Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Buzz, and will include activity updates from other social sites across the Web in the coming months. The Yahoo! Updates platform is also available as an open API, allowing any site on the Web to submit activities into it.

"Yahoo! reaches one of the largest and most-engaged consumer audiences on the Web. As we enable more choice for our users and infuse social functionality across the Yahoo! network, we are delivering on our promise to create the best place for people to start online - and return to again and again - to get everything that is most relevant to them," said Ash Patel, executive vice president, Yahoo! Audience Product Division. "By opening up to third-party innovation on Yahoo!, we are also providing new opportunities for publishers, developers and ultimately advertisers to reach and connect with more than half of the world's online population."

Y!OS: Year in Review

• Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) - Being used by developers to create innovative applications and consumer experiences, YAP is a framework for building web apps that can be distributed across Yahoo! and beyond. In just six weeks, already more than 4,000 developers have begun building apps on this new platform.
• Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP) - YSP is a set of Web services that leverage the personal connections users have across Yahoo!'s services. This platform helps Yahoo! and third-party developers infuse relevant social experiences into a variety of products and apps on and off Yahoo!.
• Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) - Yahoo! Search's open Web services platform, BOSS, enables companies and developers to leverage the Yahoo! Search infrastructure to fuel custom, innovative search experiences. Already, the BOSS API serves over 10 million queries per day.
• Yahoo! Homepage - The new Yahoo.com, currently in limited user testing, will provide access to the best of the Web from a single online starting point, including apps for people to use to check on Yahoo! and third-party email inboxes, eBay auctions and searches, and much more.
• SearchMonkey- The SearchMonkey developer tool enables developers to create applications that show enhanced Yahoo! Search results for their listings. In turn, this provides searchers with a more useful experience by including links, images and other sought-after information directly on the search results page.
• Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) - YQL, a technology innovation underpinning Y!OS, is a new web service API that lets developers access other web services using an SQL-like language rather than typical programmatic access. YQL's goal is to make data from Yahoo!, as well as from across the Internet, universally accessible through a single common interface.
• Universal Profile- Yahoo!'s recently updated universal profile allows people to centrally manage their identity across Yahoo! and make it easier to connect and share with the people who matter most to them.

OpenSocial API Blog: OpenSocial meets My Yahoo! with the Yahoo! Application Platform

Tags: Yahoo, y!OS, Open Social

Yahoo Hackday Goes Open! Open Hack 2008.

We all have heard about Yahoo Hackday before but (never cared too much ;) because it was an internal affair, meaning a digg for Yahoo employees!
But the Yahoo crew has given us a reason to care now because for the first time, they are going open with Hackday. So if you are interested in Yahoo technology, like me, would head over to Yahoo Hackday website and register. This year the hackday is held on Sep 12-13. You can sign-up for a Hack Day invitation by visiting http://www.hackday.org.
Let's hack.

Tags: Yahoo Hackday, yahoo

Yahoo! Support OpenID And Accounts Numbers Triple To 368 Million

I am a very happy user of OpenID and have been very happy to see any website that I frequent uses it. Because it makes much easier to handle multitudes of accounts one has to carry these days. People tend to use one password for all their accounts for ease and we all know it is a security risk yet continue to practice it. Using OpenID is similar but it is very much safer than anything else that is available to us common users of internet services. So when I read the Yahoo Press Release, I was very happy. Here it is.

(OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity, which eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. OpenID is still in the adoption phase and is becoming more and more popular, as large organizations like AOL, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, etc. begin to accept and provide OpenIDs. Today it is estimated that there are over 120-million OpenID enabled URLs with nine thousand sites supporting OpenID logins.)

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan 17, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced its support for the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework for all 248 million active registered Yahoo! users worldwide. OpenID, an open framework based on proven Internet technologies, enables users to consolidate their Internet identity, eliminating the need to create separate IDs and logins at all of the various websites, blogs, and profile pages they may visit in the course of their online session. In addition to the many leading Yahoo! services users already enjoy, anyone with a Yahoo! ID will be able to use the same ID for easy access to any sites that support OpenID 2.0.

Yahoo!'s initial OpenID service, which will be available in public beta on January 30, enables a seamless and transparent web experience by allowing users to use their custom OpenID identifier on me.yahoo.com or to simply type in "www.yahoo.com" or "www.flickr.com" on any site that supports OpenID 2.0. Alternatively, web sites that accept OpenID 2.0 will be able to add a simple "Sign-in with Your Yahoo! ID" button to their login pages that will make it even easier for their users. Yahoo! is working with several partners, including Plaxo and JanRain, to make it possible for users to access these sites with their Yahoo! ID from the first day of the public beta.

"A Yahoo! ID is one of the most recognizable and useful accounts to have on the Internet and with our support of OpenID, it will become even more powerful," said Ash Patel, executive vice president of platforms and infrastructure at Yahoo!. "Supporting OpenID gives our users the freedom to leverage their Yahoo! ID both on and off the Yahoo! network, reducing the number of usernames and passwords they need to remember and offering a single, trusted partner for managing their online identity."

"Yahoo!'s commitment to an open web is a significant validation of the OpenID movement and Yahoo!'s adoption of the standard today immediately triples the total number of people able to use OpenID," said Scott Kveton, chairman of the Board of Directors for the OpenID Foundation. "With Yahoo! actively engaged with the OpenID Foundation and its community to promote OpenID, Yahoo!'s users will be able to more easily access the many sites across the web that support the standard, and the potential for access to Yahoo!'s vast international user base will create an even more powerful incentive for additional websites to begin accepting OpenID users."

Yahoo!'s implementation is based on the OpenID 2.0 specification, which Yahoo! worked closely with the OpenID foundation and community to finalize in December 2007, and includes new features that improve security and usability of OpenID, making it the most user-friendly single sign-on and online user-authentication standard. Yahoo! users who log in with their Yahoo! ID on OpenID sites will have the added protection of Yahoo!'s sign-in seal wherever they go on the web. In addition, no email or IM addresses are revealed or disclosed as part of the login process, which further helps protect users from phishing or other attacks.

"Plaxo believes that users should be able to carry their identity and personal information with them wherever they go across the social web," said Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect of Plaxo. "Yahoo! is making that vision a reality by becoming an OpenID provider. Yahoo! users will be able to easily access Plaxo and other services without having to create and remember yet another password. This also paves the way for a secure approach to data portability between the various services people use across the web."

"At JanRain, we believe the evolution of the Internet and the next generation of web applications hinges on universal adoption of a secure, portable digital identity," said Larry Drebes, founder and vice president of engineering for JanRain. "JanRain is a leader in OpenID libraries, tools and applications, and has worked closely with Yahoo! to integrate its new OpenID offering into our services. The addition of 248 million Yahoo! users to the OpenID ecosystem will be a tremendous milestone in expanding the user base for OpenID."

Yahoo! will continue to devote resources to helping to improve the OpenID user experience and to educating its users. In addition, Yahoo! intends to expand its support of OpenID by adopting other elements of the program as the service evolves. More information and updates can be found at http://openid.yahoo.com.

tag: OpenID, Yahoo, OpenID 2.0, Plaxo, JanRain,

Socialize with Yahoo Mail

Socialize with Yahoo Mail, yes with new Yahoo mail allows you to send text messages directly to cell phones. With Yahoo! Mail, people can send and receive free text messages in their email to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India and the Philippines.
In addition one can instant-message chat with users of Yahoo or Microsoft's IM services. But I think SMS or the text messaging will take off as so many are texting today. The text messaging feature is integrated into the interface and works in almost exactly the same way as standard emailing, but users enter a phone number instead of an email address. Each message is limited to 150 characters. Unlike a traditional email inbox, the system creates an instant message style interface to allow users to track the course of the conversation.

Tags: Yahoo, Yahoo mail