Simon Willison’s Weblog

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! 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

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

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

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