Last month developers at Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day got a sneak preview of the new Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). YAP is in preview mode and not yet available for public use, although documentation for the new service is available.

According to Yahoo!:

The Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP) is the software and services that enable developers to build web applications that are available throughout Yahoo!– the largest audience in the world. The Yahoo! Applications Platform has the following components:

• Development environment – A browser-based tool that enables software developers to quickly create, preview, and publish web
  applications.
• APIs and web services – Programmatic access to OpenSocial functionality and popular Yahoo! web services.
• Distribution and discovery infrastructure – The built-in features
  for publishing applications on galleries on web pages such as Yahoo! Profiles.
  End users can discover applications by searching or browsing within application galleries.
• Runtime and rendering environment – The backend servers and software that run applications and convert the code into HTML.

As a platform, YAP can be used by developers to develop Open Applications, which Yahoo! describes as:

An Open Application is a web application that has been registered on the Yahoo! Development Network (YDN) and runs on the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). As seen by the end user, an Open Application has multiple views, integration points, and components.

Open Application components include a Small View, Canvas View, and Chrome. Note that YAP provides support for social applications via OpenSocial.

Here’s a video from the Yahoo! Open Hack Day that gives an overview of YAP:

We’ve included Christian Heilmann’s presentation on Opening Yahoo! to User and Developers from the Future of Web Apps Conference (held in London, England last week).

Currently there is a PHP SDK available and developers should note that Yahoo! has followed Facebook’s lead (along with numerous other platforms) by providing its own flavor of XML: Yahoo! Markup Language (YML). You can check out the reference documentation for YML, including YML Lite (a subset of YML).

Webmonkey.com has additional coverage (including screen shots) of YAP from the Open Hack Day event, and Ash Patel has compiled a list of blog posts about Yahoo!’s Hack Day and Open Strategy.

Certainly Yahoo has their share of APIs, with 32 Yahoo APIs in our directory, so there’s a lot of potential for YAP and what this new platform could mean for Yahoo.

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Nate Koechley has announced YUI 2.6.0 final:

2.6.0 introduces a new Carousel Control, offers the Paginator Control for general use (it was previously bundled with DataTable), includes more than 450 total fixes, enhancements and optimizations, graduates eight components out of “beta,” and now ships with more than 290 functional examples.

To go along with the carousel and paginator controls, you will also find details on updates too: TreeView, Calendar, Rich Text Editor, Drag & Drop, Uploader, DataTable, AutoComplete, and Container.

With Christian around, you can be sure that accessibility is taken seriously, and we see improvements there:

We’ve continued to work hard to make YUI accessible. The Carousel, Button, Menu, TabView, and Container all have enhanced accessibility support in addition to what’s otherwise noted in this blog post. We continue to count accessibility amongst our highest priorities; stay tuned for a few more blog posts on the topic in the coming days and weeks.

Yahoo is a pioneer of the Web 2.0 giants. In an industry where blogs, organizations, press, and companies just talk about the possibilities and the urge of opening up – Yahoo is the only major Internet company that really experiments with these new standards. Whereas dozens of companies take small symbolical steps, Yahoo just talks in terms of leaps. After embracing OpenID, the Sunnyvale-based company now opens up its search platform to third parties with the launch of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).

How to get back at Google

Although they state their goal is to “foster innovation in the search landscape“, we all know it’s a daring strategy to win back some terrain on Google. The big G has over 68 percent of the search market and is often called THE leader in search. Somehow, they keep on strengthening this position and it seems like they’ll never give this no. 1 position away. The Yahoo executives have realized this, and now take a different road to search success. I can’t say it better than Marshall Kirckpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, who stated that Yahoo “attacks Google with an army of verticals” – referring to the vertical search engines who will use the index of Yahoo to offer specified results for niches.

The revenge of the alts

These vertical engines now suffer from a lack of indexed sites – as it’s nearly impossible to create an index of the relevant parts of whole web. Yahoo has accomplished this, and now makes it possible for these alternative search engines to focus on the product, not the technology. As Yahoo will offer the folllowing features:

Ability to re-rank and blend results – BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
Total flexibility on presentation – Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

With this, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees the prediction he told me in January becoming reality: “Good quality search is becoming a commodity item. The search quality of Google, Yahoo and Ask are actually very similar. So the idea that Google is some kind of technological powerhouse, is actually not longer true.”

See some examples of BOSS at Hakia and Me.dium.

Clickpass, a startup that has simplified the OpenID login platform, has built out support for additional third parties that brings the promise of a universal login even closer. Users will now be able to use their Google, Facebook, Yahoo, or Hotmail passwords on any site that includes the Clickpass authentication system.

The new Clickpass system requires almost no effort from the end user. Supported sites simply embed a button on their login page which prompts users to login with their credentials from one of the aforementioned services; you don’t even need to have a Clickpass account. On supported sites, creating a new account is as simple as logging in with your preferred service (I use Gmail), and picking a display name to show other users. This is what OpenID should be.

So what’s the catch? At launch the service only works on a handful of sites, but CEO Peter Nixey says that implementing it on a website is easy – we can expect to see the number of supported sites skyrocket in the next few days. Developers need only implement the standard OpenID protocol along with the Clickpass system and they’re good to go.

One problem that Clickpass will soon face is that it is really a temporary solution to a problem most of these companies are already working on. We can expect Google, Yahoo, and the rest of the lot to implement their own version of OpenID, which will effectively take Clickpass out of the equation.

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This week Yahoo announced its new Internet Location Platform API, “a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth” that “provide[s] the Yahoo! Geographic Developer Community with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world’s geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner.” (For more details see our new API profile.)

The RESTful read-only API associates “almost any named place on the Earth” with a unique identifier (called a “Where on Earth ID” or WOEID). Using Berkeley, California as an example you can see how the API uses WOEIDs to tell you about the relationship among locations. First, to look up the WOEID for Berkeley, CA:

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(’Berkeley%20CA%20USA’)

returns an XML response tells you, among other things, the WOEID for Berkeley, CA (2362930), the centroid of Berkeley (37.869499, -122.270531), and a bounding box for the city. For a given WOEID, you can get the same data. In our example,

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930

resolves the WOEID of 2362930 back to Berkeley, CA.

The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform describes the relationships among locations in a variety of hierarchies. First of all, there is the concept of a locations’ parent. Any given WOEID has at most one parent. You can get the parent Berkeley, CA with

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930/parent?select=long

which returns a detailed record for Alameda County, the county in which Berkeley is located. You can then ask the API for the entire parent-oriented hierarchy (a WOEID’s parent, parent’s parent, etc.) with

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930/ancestors

which returns Alameda County -> California -> United States -> North America.

You can use the API to ask for the children of a WOEID. The URL

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930/children;count=100

returns the locations whose parent is Berkeley, CA. You’ll see a variety of place types in the list, including “suburbs” (e.g., South Berkeley) and zip codes (e.g., 94703). Note the use of the matrix parameter count to increase the number of children returned to up to 100.

Not surprisingly, you can ask for the siblings of a WOEID, all the other locations that share the same parent. Among the siblings of Berkeley, CA listed in http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930/siblings;count=100 are such places as Albany, Oakland, and Union City, which are other cities located in Alameda County.

What makes the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform especially interesting is how it supports “unofficial” or “informal” relationships beyond the strict one-parent-at-most hierarchy in belongtos and neighbors methods. The URL

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930/neighbors;count=100

returns “neighbors” to Berkeley, CA including Albany (which has the same parent as Berkeley) but also El Cerrito (which has a different parent, namely, Contra Costa County). It’s puzzling, however, why Oakland is not considered a neighbor to Berkeley. I suppose the caveat that “that neighbors are not necessarily geographically contiguous” can be extended to “geographically continguous locations are not necessarily neighbors”.

Or by using the belongtos verb you can learn about various informal aggregations. The URL

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2362930/belongtos;count=100

returns both official containing units for Berkeley (e.g., Alameda County and California) but also somewhat fuzzier units (West Coast, San Francisco Bay Area, and New Southwest).

Finally, there’s support for “location names in multiple languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as well as local double-byte character set data in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan.” For example, look at record for the USA in English, French, and Chinese.

WOEIDs are already being used in Flickr and its API, as Rev Dan Catt documents. Presumably, the Location Platform API will be used throughout Yahoo!’s other services (such as the Fire Eagle API.)

However, will WOEIDs be widely adopted outside of the context of using Yahoo!’s services? The breadth of coverage should be attractive to many developers:

The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform contains about six million places. Coverage varies from country-to-country but globally includes several hundred thousand unique administrative areas with half a million variant names; several thousand historical administrative areas; over two million unique settlements and suburbs, and two-and-a-half million unique postcode points covering about 150 countries, plus a significant number of points of interest, Colloquial Regions, Area Codes, Time Zones, and Islands.

However, there are important questions of ownership/restrictions on this data the possibility of lock-in. It’d be interesting, for instance, to compare the functionality and depth of the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform with the data and services currently in the GeoNames API (see its ProgrammableWeb profile and the list of 38 mashups using the API.) On a technical note, the current API doesn’t seem to support reverse geocoding (to return a place name for a given latitude and longitude), functionality found in the Flickr API and GeoNames API).

For further analysis, you can read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s piece in ReadWriteWeb, Brady Forrest in O’Reilly Radar, as well as Rev Dan Catt’s detailed analysis, mentioned above.

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Yahoo’s CTO Ari Balogh and Chief Architect (Platforms) Neal Sample filled in a few more details today around their new Yahoo Open Strategy (called YOS internally).

Background

Yahoo wants to turn itself into one big social network-driven site, and simultaneously open many of its core services to get users and developers thinking of Yahoo as their Internet hub. They’ve been talking about parts of this since last November. First were details about how webmail will serve as the social networking hub, followed by more tidbits in January. In March they joined the Google-led Open Social initiative. And they’ve made a series of announcements around Search Monkey which will allow third parties to enhance Yahoo search with structured data.

Yahoo Open Strategy

Yahoo mashes the social stuff and the open stuff under the same banner of YOS. There are three components to the additional news announced today – platformization, opening services, and portability. It’s important to note that nothing has launched, and there’s no public timetable for the launch of any particular part of YOS. Sample said in a briefing today that the pieces will be released over the coming months.

Below is Balogh’s presentation at the web 2.0 Expo:

Platformization: Users will notice this most, as the overall Yahoo experience becomes social. This is driven by (1) the reduction of the dozens of profiles (for each service) they have today to a single, unified Yahoo user profile, and (2) the promotion of the email inbox as the center of the Yahoo experience. Once the profile is centralized they will begin to socialize the services. Think friends lists, activity streams, etc.

Clearly Yahoo isn’t bolting yet another social network onto their existing services. They keep saying that, of course. But even the fact that they refer to this part of it as “platformization” internally shows how they are thinking of this. They’re moving Yahoo to a massive new social network platform, and rewriting large parts of the core functionality.

Open Yahoo: This encompasses a few different things. First, they are now deeply involved in OpenSocial and will allow developers to get access via those common APIs. But they are layering their many existing (and planned) APIs on top of OpenSocial to allow deeper integration with Yahoo services. Users will be able to add these third party applications, built on Open Social and the Yahoo APIs, into Yahoo.

The other piece of this is Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) – which will be a direct competitor to Google App Engine. Users can host their independent applications on Yahoo’s bandwidth, storage, database and CPU resources. At first they’ll support SecurePHP applications only, but they’ll expand to additional languages over time. The model will be very similar to Google’s – free usage up to a point, metered after that. They’ll also offer various developer tools as well.

Portability. Yahoo is also going to promote the spread of Yahoo around the web to third party apps and services. This isn’t just widgets – they’ll also let user data out of the ecosystem. For example, Sample said in the briefing, they’ll facilitate the synchronization of the Yahoo address book with Plaxo (Facebook hated the idea of users doing this, by the way).

Yahoo: Sticky, Viral, Friendly

Yahoo continues to compete in search marketing, the big driver of revenue. But they realize they’ll always be second to Google in that game. So the win for them is to make Yahoo as sticky, friendly, and viral as possible. They have 500 million worldwide visitors per month – nearly 60% of the total Internet audience visits a Yahoo property every month (Google has 72%) (Comscore). That audience can clearly be leveraged, and this is a war that, unlike search marketing, Yahoo thinks they can win.

They still, of course, have to actually launch this massive project – for now it’s all ideas and vaporware. And no one knows what Microsoft thinks of all this, or what happens to YOS if that deal is done.

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Yahoo’s Tom Coates today finally released FireEagle at ETech 2008. Seeing Tom in the office for quite a while getting everything ready makes me very happy to announce that it is out and invite you to come along and sign up for the beta to start testing and – even more importantly – developing applications for it. This is FireEagle:

Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user’s location? Or, maybe you’ve found a way to capture someone’s location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

Once you got in you’ll be able to download development kits in several languages including PHP, Python, Ruby and of course JavaScript. All the API calls are REST and the API authentication is handled via OAuth. The output format is either XML or JSON. The code is licensed with BSD and you can even contribute to the FireEagle source at a code repository.

The available API calls are:

user

Returns the location of a specific user in a location hierarchy format.

recent

Returns a list of users of the application who have updated their location within the given amount of time.

within

Takes a Place ID or a WoE ID and returns a list of users using your application who are within the bounding box of that location.

update

Sets a user’s current location using using a Place ID hash or a set of location parameters. If the user provides a location unconfirmed with lookup method then Fire Eagle makes a best guess as to the user’s location and updates.

lookup

Disambiguates potential values for update. Results from lookup can be passed to update to ensure that Fire Eagle will understand how to parse the location parameter.

You can learn more by watching the video of Tom explaining FireEagle at ETech.

The uses for a service like this are endless. From sensible search applications that show you places of interest nearby your current location up to real-life games of high-tech hide and seek everything is possible.

Version 2.5 of the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) was released today. You can get all the details on the official blog post, but here’s the “change log”:

• The new Layout Manager allows you to create multi-pane user interfaces that are collapsible and resizable.
• The Flash-enhanced File Uploader control might be known to you from Flickr and and allows you to easily batch-upload files and images with progress bars.
• The JavaScript Profiler now has a graphical front-end to make the information more easily understandable
• The YUI Data Table performs faster and got new features, including horizontal and vertical scrolling, a paginator class, drag and drop columns and an API to access, add and remove columns.
• The Image Cropper control allows you to pick a part of an image to be cropped server-side
• The Cookie Controller provides a wrapper for all things to do with cookies
• The Slider Control got updated to support multiple handles to define a range rather than just a state.

In addition to that, some of the components left beta status. These are the Get Utility to retrieve scripts and style sheets on the fly, the ColorPicker Control, the JSON Utility to validate JSON, the ImageLoader Utility to load images on-demand to increase page performance and the YUI Test Utility.

The really detailed report on all the changes is available on the YUI list/forum.

If you want to have a quick glimpse of what the Layout Control allows you to create, check out the demo application interface simulating simulating Yahoo Mail.

The Flash-y folks at Yahoo! have released a slew of Flash and Flex components in their ASTRA suite:

New Flash components:

• AlertManager — a user interface component that creates alert windows and manages their queue.
• AudioPlayback — a set of controls for audio playback.
• MenuBar — a component that renders hierarchical data as a row of buttons with nested menus (using the Menu component)

On the Flex front, we have:

• AutoCompleteManager is a component that manages a set of input controls, popping up suggestions when a user types into one of the fields. Instead of replacing TextInput fields with a specific AutoComplete control, you can simply point the manager to one or more TextInputs, and you’ll get a slick pop-up or auto-fill interaction.
• Color Pickers:
  • ColorPlaneAndSliderPicker is a user interface component that allows the user to pick a color value. It combines a one-dimensional color slider with a two-dimensional color plane.
  • ColorSliderPicker is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to pick a color value. It combines a set of sliders where each slider represents a component of a colorspace. For example, a ColorSliderPicker displaying an RGB color includes a red slider, a green slider, and a blue slider.
  • DropDownColorPicker is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to pick a color value. Similar to the standard Flex ColorPicker control, the DropDownColorPicker also gives the developer the ability to completely change the dropdown control to give the user a variety of color views.
• IPv4AddressInput is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to input an Internet Protocol version 4 address. This control includes a field for each separate byte and full keyboard navigation.
• TimeInput is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to input a time value. This control include fields for hours, minutes, seconds, and AM/PM. Styling options allow the time to be presented in 12- or 24-hour formats.
• TimeStepper is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to input a time value. This control include fields for hours, minutes, seconds, and AM/PM. Styling options allow the time to be presented in 12- or 24-hour formats. Up and down buttons allow the user to increase or decrease the currently selected field.