OpenID100 items tagged “yahoo”
GeoPlanet Explorer. Chris Heilmann’s YQL powered explorer for the invaluable Yahoo! GeoPlanet / WhereOnEarth dataset. Every API deserves an explorer of some sort. 
2nd March 2010, 8:14 am
GeoPlanet data available again (via) Good news: the Yahoo! GeoPlanet data dump is available again. An issue with one of their data providers meant they had to remove that supplier’s data from the dump, but it’s now been separated and the dataset is live gain. By the end of 2010 they intend to derive all of the data from completely open sources. 
11th December 2009, 8:17 am
Yahoo! OpenID: Now with Attribute Exchange! The nice thing about this is that an e-mail address obtained from Yahoo! via attribute exchange has already been verified, so you don’t need to perform the e-mail roundtrip yourself. I expect a lot of OpenID consuming sites will end up with internal whitelists of OpenID providers who they trust to provide verified e-mail addresses, with users of sites not on the whitelist still getting e-mailed a verification link. 5th December 2009, 5:25 pm
Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery. Write a plugin for YUI3, BSD license it and sign a CLA and Yahoo! will push your module out to their CDN and make it loadable using the YUI().use() statement. They’re coordinating the submissions using GitHub. 4th November 2009, 11:14 pm
Traffic Server. Mark Nottingham explains the release of Traffic Server, a new Apache Incubator open source project donated by Yahoo! using code originally developed at Inktomi around a decade ago. Traffic Server is a HTTP proxy/cache, similar to Squid and Varnish (though Traffic Server acts as both a forward and reverse proxy, whereas Varnish only handles reverse). 1st November 2009, 12:15 pm
This shouldn’t be the image of Hack Day
I love hack days. I was working in the vicinity of Chad Dickerson when he organised the first internal Yahoo! Hack Day back in 2005, and I’ve since participated in hack day events at Yahoo!, Global Radio and the Guardian. I’ve also been to every one of Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day events in London. They’re fantastic, and the team that organises them should be applauded. [... 445 words]
YUI 3.0.0: First GA Release of YUI’s Next-Generation Codeline. YUI 3 has some very neat ideas—everything is dynamically loaded, so you start with a tiny bootstrap script and call YUI().use(’module-name’) to load just the code you need. Congratulations to the team. 
29th September 2009, 11:38 pm
OpenID: Now more powerful and easier to use! The OpenID+OAuth hybrid protocol (where a user can sign in with OpenID and grant an application access to their OAuth protected resources such as a contact list at the same time) is now supported by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace—this feels like OpenID finally coming of age. 25th September 2009, 9:08 pm
By Popular Demand, We’re Keeping the Term Extraction Service. Yahoo! aren’t shutting down the term extractor after all. On the one hand, this is a great decision—but this kind of back and forth (dare I say flip-flopping?) really doesn’t help encourage people to build against hosted APIs. 19th August 2009, 11:44 am
Yahoo! Term Extraction and Contextual Web Search services to be discontinued. The official closure date is August 31st. Term extraction was really useful—thankfully there are a number of decent alternatives such as Zemanta, OpenCalais and topia.termextract. 
12th August 2009, 11:57 am
Today’s News and Yahoo!’s Developer Program. “For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you” ... “We wanted to let you know that today’s news does not affect these products [YUI, YQL, Pipes]”. 30th July 2009, 12:20 pm
YQL: INSERT INTO internet. insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values (“Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL”, “twitterusername”,“twitterpassword”) 8th July 2009, 8:19 pm
Yahoo! proposal to open source “Traffic Server” via the ASF. Traffic Server is a “fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 compliant caching proxy server” (presumably equivalent to things like Squid and Varnish) originally acquired from Inktomi and developed internally at Yahoo! for the past three years, which has been benchmarked handling 35,000 req/s on a single box. No source code yet but it looks like the release will arrive pretty soon. 
7th July 2009, 12:37 pm
geocoders. A fifteen minute project extracted from something else I’m working on—an ultra simple Python API for geocoding a single string against Google, Yahoo! Placemaker, GeoNames and (thanks to Jacob) Yahoo! Geo’s web services. 
27th May 2009, 10:02 am
JS-Placemaker—geolocate texts in JavaScript. Chris Heilmann exposed Placemaker to JavaScript (JSONP) using a YQL execute table. Try his examples—I’m impressed that “My name is Jack London, I live in Ontario” returns just Ontario, demonstrating that Placemaker’s NLP is pretty well tuned. 23rd May 2009, 12:36 am
Flickr Shapefiles Public Dataset 1.0. Another awesome Geo dataset from the Yahoo! stable—this time it’s Flickr releasing shapefiles (geometrical shapes) for hundreds of thousands of places around the world, under the CC0 license which makes them essentially public domain. The shapes themselves have been crowdsourced from geocoded photos uploaded to Flickr, where users can “correct” the textual location assigned to each photo. Combine this with the GeoPlanet WOE data and you get a huge, free dataset describing the human geography of the world. 22nd May 2009, 6:12 pm
Yahoo! Placemaker. Really exciting new API from Yahoo!—Placemaker accepts a block of text (or a URL to HTML or RSS) and extracts and returns geographical locations mentioned in the text. I just ran my djng blog entry through it and it pulled out “Prague” as the only location mentioned. This should be really useful for adding geodata to existing textual content. 20th May 2009, 9:34 pm
Yahoo! Geo: Announcing GeoPlanet Data. The Yahoo! WhereOnEarth geographic data set is fantastic, but I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable about building applications against it in case the API went away. That’s not an issue any more—the entire dataset is now available to download and use under a Creative Commons Attribution license. It’s not entirely clear what the attribution requirements are—do you have to put “data from GeoPlanet” on every page or can you get away with just tucking the attribution away in an “about this site” page? UPDATE: The data doesn’t include latitude/longitude or bounding boxes, which severely reduces its utility. 20th May 2009, 9:12 pm
With YQL Execute, the Internet becomes your database. This is nuts (in a good way). Yahoo!’s intriguing universal SQL-style XML/JSONP web service interface now supports JavaScript as a kind of stored procedure language, meaning you can use JavaScript and E4X to screen-scrape web pages, then query the results with YQL. 29th April 2009, 10:50 pm
Bring bandwidth and disks. Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.
— Jason Scott 26th April 2009, 10:30 am
Yahoo! Query Language thoughts. An engineer on Google’s App Engine provides an expert review of Yahoo!’s YQL. I found this more useful than the official documentation. 9th February 2009, 10:29 pm
YQL opens up 3rd-party web service table definitions to developers. This really is astonishingly clever: you can create an XML file telling Yahoo!’s YQL service how to map an arbitrary API to YQL tables, then make SQL-style queries against it (including joins against other APIs). Another neat trick: doing a SQL “in” query causes API requests to be run in parallel and recombined before being returned to you. 9th February 2009, 9:08 pm
New Gearman Server & Library in C, MySQL UDFs. Gearman, the job queue written for LiveJournal and now used by Digg and Yahoo!, has been rewritten in C. Looks like a good candidate for an easily configured lightweight message queue. Also includes hooks for writing MySQL functions that can interact with queues. 13th January 2009, 4:41 pm
A Snapshot of The Yahoo! Photos Beta (from 2006). Scott Schiller shares an internal retrospective on the Yahoo! Photos interface from 2006, which was years ahead of its time (they started building it before the term Ajax had even been coined). The material on memory management and event delegation is particularly interesting. 12th January 2009, 10:21 pm
Amazon SimpleDB—Now With Select. So now all three of Yahoo!, Amazon and Google have invented their own SQL-like languages (YQL, SimpleDB and GQL)—though it looks like Yahoo!’s is the only one that attempts to provide joins. 18th December 2008, 8:59 am
Yahoo! yesterday launched their new development platform for My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail, which uses Caja to protect users from malicious gadgets. This means Caja suddenly got 275,000,000 users. Wow! I guess this makes Caja the most widely used capability language ever.
— Ben Laurie 16th December 2008, 4:33 pm
Yahoo! Query Language Console. Neat developer tool for playing around with YQL. 13th December 2008, 9:39 am
YQL—converting the web to JSON with mock SQL. YQL just got a whole lot more interesting to me—I had no idea they were exposing an HTML and RSS scraping tool over a JSONP API in addition to all of the Yahoo! web service methods. 13th December 2008, 9:39 am
Yahoo, Caja, OpenSocial. Yahoo!’s new application platform uses OpenSocial, and protects itself from malicious JavaScript using Google’s Caja secure JavaScript engine. I hadn’t realised that Caja was ready for production use—this is excellent news. 30th October 2008, 5:14 pm
Conditional classnames. Yahoo!’s internal coding standards still recommend CSS hacks over conditional comments because a separate stylesheet for IE imposes an additional HTTP request. Paul Hammond points out that you can use conditional comments to write out an extra class=“ie” attribute on the body element and use that to target the IE specific fixes in your stylesheets. 
17th October 2008, 1:32 pm
Go Get Yer Shiny New Yahoo Profile... And Make Some Connections! I’m surprised to see Yahoo! going with mutual friendships as the core of their new social platform—I’ve personally found social sites which support a one-way “follow” relationship far more useful. 16th October 2008, 7:05 pm
Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research. Extremely valuable research, conducted with a group of typical Yahoo! users. OpenIDs usability remains bad, and if we don’t get it right soon something centralised like Facebook Connect will take over and the Web will stop being open. 14th October 2008, 4:59 pm
Yahoo could also have followed Gmail’s lead, and disabled the security-question mechanism unless no logged-in user had accessed the account for five days. This clever trick prevents password “recovery” when there is evidence that somebody who knows the password is actively using the account.
— Ed Felten 22nd September 2008, 4:21 pm
Google wants your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL contacts. And they’re using the password anti-pattern to get them! Despite both Yahoo! and Hotmail (and Google themselves; not sure about AOL) offering a safe, OAuth-style API for retrieving contacts without asking for a password. This HAS to be a communications failure somewhere within Google. Big internet companies stand to lose the most from widespread abuse of the anti-pattern, because they’re the ones most likely to be targetted by phishers. Shameful. 15th September 2008, 10:39 am
Fire Eagle has launched! No need for an invite any more, hooray! 12th August 2008, 9:33 pm
How not to apply for a job. Quite reasonably, 37signals care if job applicants get their wordmark right. Having worked for Yahoo! I know how important that ! is. What really winds me up is companies that aren’t consistent with name capitalisation across their own sites—many startups are guilty of this. 17th June 2008, 8:22 am
There is a reason why Flickr eventually killed Yahoo! Photos and why it was decided that Google Video be relegated to being a search brand while YouTube would be the social sharing brand. The brand baggage and the accompanying culture made them road kill.
— Dare Obasanjo 16th June 2008, 2:54 pm
Reputation patterns in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (via) Pragmatic advice from Yahoo! on encouraging community participation. 10th June 2008, 11:49 am
The X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. News to me, but both Google and Yahoo! have supported it since last year. You can add per-page robots exclusion rules in HTTP headers instead of using meta tags, and Google’s version supports unavailable_after which is handy for content with a known limited shelf-life. 9th June 2008, 9:21 am
Yahoo! Address Book API Delivered. At last, now there’s no excuse to ask your users for their Yahoo! username and password just so you can scrape their address book. 4th June 2008, 6:03 pm
Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. As an ex-Yahoo! this is really exciting—WhereOnEarth (a London company acquired by Yahoo! in 2005) provide the incredibly detailed geographical data used by Flickr, Upcoming and FireEagle—and now it’s available as an external API. 12th May 2008, 9:02 pm
Find Your Friends. Flickr have added a characteristically classy friend import feature, pulling from Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail address books without any unhygienic password sharing. It’s a crying shame that the Yahoo! contacts API they are using isn’t available outside the company. 1st April 2008, 1:01 am
An OpenSocial Foundation. “Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.” Good move; I’d personally love to see this happen with Google Gears. 25th March 2008, 2:51 pm
Yahoo!’s Latest Performance Breakthroughs. 20 new performance tips to join the previously published 14. Flushing the buffer while the backend code is still working to cause the browser to start loading CSS earlier is interesting. 20th March 2008, 3:17 pm
Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast. 6th March 2008, 11:29 pm
Welcome to Fire Eagle! It’s launched! A service and accompanying API for saving your physical location and selectively sharing it with applications that you trust. 5th March 2008, 7:05 pm
Interview: Simon Willison on OpenID. Christian Heilmann interviewed me for the YDN blog. 3rd February 2008, 10:18 pm
Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta. This actually happened a few days ago, but I’ve been offline for the past week travelling to New Zealand and attending Kiwi Foo. 3rd February 2008, 10:17 pm
Yahoo! supporting OpenID 2.0 but not 1.1. Yahoo!’s Allen Tom outlines the reasons Yahoo! are supporting OpenID 2.0 but not OpenID 1.1. 19th January 2008, 9:10 am
Yahoo! OpenIDs are the same for all RPs. I had assumed that Yahoo! would be using directed identity to provide a different OpenID for each user/site combination, to prevent correlation of accounts. I was incorrect; they’re just using it for easier sign-in, with the same auto-generated URL used for every site. 
19th January 2008, 9:05 am
Yahoo!’s provider implementation only supports consumers that talk the Auth 2.0 protocol. Technically the 2.0 spec allows providers to shun 1.1, but it’s not recommended for the reason that I’m sure will become obvious once Yahoo! launches: there’s no way for your average end-user to distinguish between a 1.1 and a 2.0 implementation.
— Martin Atkins 18th January 2008, 7 am
Oh, and before anyone jumps on me about this not being “full” (meaning bi-directional) OpenID support, I’m quite aware of that. Consuming OpenID is a different beast that can’t happen overnight. Give it some time. I’m optimistic that we’ll get there.
— Jeremy Zawodny 17th January 2008, 7:05 pm
openid.yahoo.com. Yahoo!’s human readable guide to OpenID, complete with tour. It looks like they’re relying on the “sign-in seal” to protect against phishing. 17th January 2008, 2:35 pm
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. 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.
— Ash Patel 17th January 2008, 2:31 pm
Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID. Here’s the official press release: “Yahoo! Support Triples Number of OpenID Accounts to 368 million”. Directed identity gets a mention; it’s going to be enabled for www.yahoo.com and www.flickr.com. The public beta starts on January 30th. 17th January 2008, 2:29 pm
Why we switched to Jetty. Zimbra (recently acquired by Yahoo!) are using Jetty for Comet. It sounds like they are using Bayeux as well. 8th January 2008, 5:12 am
Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection
Via ReadWriteWeb, view source on a Flickr photostream page and search for “openid” and you’ll be rewarded with the following snippet: [... 582 words]
Flickr to Authenticate OpenID. Flickr /photos/username/ pages are now (almost) OpenIDs—they point at a new Yahoo!-wide OpenID server, but it hasn’t been switched on yet. It’s OpenID 2 only, presumably so Yahoo! can protect their users’ privacy by using directed identity to hide individual screen names. 7th January 2008, 10:48 pm
Fire foxes, fire eagles, fire dogs: myth in a new media world (via) Entertaining over-analysis of Fire Eagle, the code name for Yahoo!’s soon-to-be-released geo location broker. It’s actually named after Ze Frank’s Ride The Fire Eagle Danger Day, as any Sports Racer would know. 15th December 2007, 12:25 pm
YUI 2.4.0 released. Lots of great new features, but the one I’m most excited about is Selector: YUI finally has a CSS query engine. 5th December 2007, 3:32 pm
Yahoo! Search Contextual Precaching. Neat performance trick on Yahoo! Search: the moment you start typing (indicating you intend to search) the site quietly fires off a bunch of requests to precache assets needed for the search results page. 16th November 2007, 3:58 pm
The password anti-pattern. What I don’t understand is why Google / Yahoo! / other webmail providers haven’t just deployed a simple OAuth-style API for accessing the address book. Sites have been scraping them for years anyway; surely it’s better to offer an official API than continue to see users hand out their passwords? 12th October 2007, 9:25 am
Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context. Fantastic presentation from Ian Rogers, the head of Yahoo! Music, who has spent 8 years watching DRM cripple the online music industry. 8th October 2007, 9:10 pm
YSlow: Bug (fix) in Firebug’s Net Panel. The latest release of the YSlow page analysis plugin (announced at FOWA) also fixes a misleading bug in Firebug’s Net panel. 5th October 2007, 10:26 pm
The Elements of JavaScript Style. Douglas Crockford illustrates better coding practises through refactoring of old code. 13th September 2007, 8:22 am
YSlow. New extension for Firebug (yes, an extension on top of another extension) from the Yahoo! performance team which provides improved performance measurement tools and optimisation advice. 25th July 2007, 4:48 am
FireEagle. Location broker API, launched at Hack Day London. I worked on an early version of this before leaving Yahoo! back in January—great to see it out. 19th June 2007, 10:30 am
A JavaScript Module Pattern. I’ve been using this pattern for a few months—it works really well, though I tend to keep my own code in my own namespace rather than adding it to YAHOO. 12th June 2007, 11:30 pm
The Zonetag API Goes Public. Awesome new API from YRB—given a cell tower ID can provide both a location and a list of suggested tags, based on data collected by ZoneTag. 2nd June 2007, 12:53 am
Top XSS exploits by PageRank. Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook all feature. 29th May 2007, 10:07 pm
Using YUI with the Yahoo! Maps AJAX API. I got bitten by this today—if you’re using both YUI and a Yahoo! map on the same page you need to take a few precautions to avoid library version conflicts. 8th May 2007, 4:07 pm
The YUI Team Is Hiring an Engineer To Work on Firebug. “... we’re opening a search for a full-time developer to work with Joe on advancing the Firebug roadmap.” 7th May 2007, 10:40 pm
Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000. I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties. 4th May 2007, 5:54 pm
MSFT and Yahoo: two icebergs, roped together. Yahoo!’s engineering platform and culture is Open Source pretty much all the way down. Microsoft’s isn’t. I wonder how that would pan out. 4th May 2007, 5:50 pm
Introduction and Yahoo! Pipes. The official Google Maps API blog describes how to plot KML output from Yahoo! Pipes. 3rd May 2007, 10 pm
The New Upcoming. No more metros! Upcoming is now hooked in to Yahoo!’s WhereOnEarth data, meaning plenty of geocoded brilliance. 20th April 2007, 12:13 am
A Hack for Europe! Signups are now open for Hack Day Europe, on June 16th and 17th. You need to apply for an invitation. 18th April 2007, 11:24 pm
Hack Day 2007—get your diaries out. Yahoo! UK and the BBC are hosting a public hack day on the weekend of June 16th/17th at Alexandra Palace, complete with a concert from a “top secret” band. The US hack day surprise performance was Beck. 29th March 2007, 2:24 pm
Introducing the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. 101 pages of documentation—this thing is huge! 29th March 2007, 2:47 am
Serving YUI Files from Yahoo! Servers (via) If everyone who uses YUI links to the same set of files, your users will already have the YUI code cached in their browser when they arrive on your site. 23rd February 2007, 6:45 pm
Badge Any RSS Feed With Yahoo! Pipes. Smart hack from Kent Brewster. Uses Yahoo! Pipes’ JSON output plus a few lines of JavaScript to create a badge from any RSS feed. 16th February 2007, 8:21 am
Flickr users are marked as such in the Yahoo user database. What this means is that the account is permanently protected from deletion, even if you cancel your SBC-Yahoo DSL and even if you never check your Yahoo Mail (if you elect to have one). Both free and pro accounts are protected. And your Yahoo signon name will not be displayed anywhere on Flickr -- your existing Flickr username will stay the same.
— crawl on MeFi 31st January 2007, 10:27 pm
idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so. [... 414 words]
Leaving Yahoo!, going freelance
Last Friday was my last day at Yahoo!. I’ve had a fantastic time there, and will really miss working with Tom, Paul and the many other superb Yahoos I’ve had the privilege to meet. [... 209 words]
Browser Cache Usage—Exposed! Includes real numbers for browser cache usage on some of Yahoo!’s most popular pages. 7th January 2007, 10:20 pm
Introducing Operator. New microformat detecting Firefox extension, developed at IBM and released by Mozilla Labs. Examples are from Yahoo! Local, Upcoming and Flickr. 18th December 2006, 4:36 pm
Yahoo! aerial imagery in OpenStreetMap. Tracing is allowed. This should speed things up an awful lot. 4th December 2006, 1:17 pm
Y! Cool Thing: Mapping The Globe. Yahoo! finally adds international maps, with great coverage. 10th November 2006, 10:55 pm
Yahoo! bookmarks uses symfony. Top reason for the decision was the excellent documentation. 9th November 2006, 12:28 pm
Menuism on Y! BBAuth. 70% of new users chose to use their Yahoo! account rather than create a new one. 31st October 2006, 4:51 pm
Yahoo! Browser-Based Authentication (via) This is a Really Big Deal. Yahoo! has over 200 million /active/ user accounts. 29th September 2006, 7:21 pm
YDN Python Developer Center. Launched today: tips and tutorials on accessing Yahoo! Web services from Python. 8th August 2006, 8:57 pm
Video: Joe Hewitt Talks About FireBug. Demo / tutorial. 31st May 2006, 8:17 am
Notes from my Yahoo! UI Library talk
I gave my talk on the Yahoo! User Interface Library here at XTech on Tuesday. There’s so much great stuff in the library that cramming it all in to 45 minutes proved impossible, so I ended up focusing on the utilities (dom, event, connection, animation and dragdrop) and providing an overview of the controls at the end. [... 141 words]
Yahoo! UI JavaScript treats
The Yahoo! Developer Network was updated yesterday with a veritable gold-mine of Exciting New Stuff, coinciding with the launch of the brand new Yahoo! User Interface Blog. [... 576 words]
Yahoo! UI Library. Open Source JavaScript widgets and libraries. 14th February 2006, 1:12 am
JSON and Yahoo!’s JavaScript APIs
I had the pleasure yesterday of seeing Douglas Crockford speak about JSON, the ultra-simple data interchange format he has been promoting as an alternative to XML. JSON is a subset of JavaScript, based around that language’s array, string and object literal syntax. [... 240 words]
Using JSON with Yahoo! Web Services (via) No more cross-domain script access problems. 15th December 2005, 11:53 pm
Yahoo!’s new twist on mapping APIs
One of the most exciting things I’ve seen at Yahoo! since starting here has finally been made public: the new Yahoo Maps. The map application itself differs from many other recent map sites in being rendered entirely in Flash. This leaves far more scope for interface niceties, but doesn’t it reduce the scope for hacking that made things like Google Maps so much fun? [... 623 words]
Working for Yahoo!
I guess it’s about time I blogged this: Monday was my first official day working for Yahoo! I’ve joined the new Technology Development group, first mentioned by Jeremy Zawodny a couple of months ago. My first assignment is with the Flickr team, where I will be working on some Cool New Stuff. How exciting is that? [... 82 words]
