Yahoo Introduces Y!OS, opens up itself!

Yahoo recently launched what is called "Rewriting of Yahoo", Y!OS: Yahoo! Open Strategy. The strategy is to open up everything to developers including content,traffic and Yahoo's user base. Developers will be able to use all the open assets, build application on them and even display them on their web site. The platform is being introduced with the introduction of social suite or more popularly Social API.

Y!OS is built on three things:

• Yahoo! Social Platform
• Yahoo! Query Language
• Yahoo! Application Platform

The social platform enables yahoo users to experience the socializing of web. Yahoo has been experimenting with web socialization using Y!360 and then Mash. But both of this products did not click. The new platform will aggregate relationships in Mail, Messenger, Address Book, and other social areas of Yahoo! to recommend connections to our users. For this Yahoo profiles is also revamped! For developers, all these profile data will be accessible using RESTful APIs.

YQL is the single point entry for developers to query, filter and combine data from Yahoo. It will provide SQL like statements in its query language. Apart from this developers will also have access to RSS and HTML pages to get information. You can get more information from YQL documentation.

YAP brings the front end! It will allow the developers to easily author and publish application across Yahoo network. developers will have Java script, server side scripting (YML) and flash at their disposal for developing applications. These application can be easily embedded into Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Front Page etc. This is many made possible using Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform.

All in all, yahoo is opening up like Google, integrating applications available for users and basically socializing. But I see most of these things are already available with Google. So will these platforms give Google a competition?

Yahoo and SearchMonkey invitation!

My week long Websphere training kept me away from mails and I was not so surprised to see a mail from Yahoo with the subject line - "Invitation : SearchMonkey Developer Launch Party 5/15". So, they are ready to launch their new approach to searching. The launch party is at Yahoo HQ on May 15th. Apart from the live demos you will get tasty food & beer.

For those who don't know SearchMonkey - Its a new open developer platform that allows developers and site owners to use semantic web standards and structured data to enhance Yahoo! Search results and make them more useful, relevant, and visually appealing.

You can register for the event at upcoming!

A peep into Yahoo Mash!

I just claimed profile on Yahoo’s new social network, Yahoo Mash! The site began with "invitation only" preview, and got my invitation from my friend Vishnu. Yahoo already have a social network site called Yahoo 360. But this is mostly ignored! So Yahoo is about to launch a whole new social network site to complete with orkut, facebook and others? but first lets have peep into Mash.

Like any other social networking services available Mash also goes with the terminology of profile, friends but with a catch. Users can edit each other’s profiles, redecorating, changing information, and adding features. New features are presented in the form of modules which can be added and moved around in the profile. There are lots of modules that can be added to the profile like RSS readers,Mash pets, Guest book, Asteroids etc..

Mash have differnet type for menu, you can view your profile's and friends latest action in "Pulse". This is somthing orkut have started recently. In orkut after the UI revamp, we can see latest activites in our neighbourhood, a similar concept is "Pulse". The "Friends" menu is simple for now with no search functionality and limited grouping. You can gourp your friends to best friends, Just friends and Family only. You can invite as many friends and even import your mailing address book from Yahoo, Gmail and MSN.

So for now Yahoo Mash is infant now. There are more functionality to come for sure!

flickr Slide show

flickrSLiDR allows you to add flickr slide shows on to your website or blog by simply adding some HTML code. The only requirement is the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group you would like to display. There is also some attributes available to customize the slide show display.

Adding the slide show is a simple 3 step process. Visit http://flickrslidr.com/ and fill the form...


Copy the HTML code from the text area and paste it in your required webpage. Check out my new Album.

Yahoo Pipes! What is it?

According to Yahoo their pipes product is defined as “Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment.” So, what is this product all about? How good is this product? What opportunities does it give? Let’s have a closer look and find out.

The basic idea behind pipes is to get feeds from different sources like Yahoo, Google, Digg etc, and present it in a better, useful way to the user. What pipes can do now is assemble personalized information from different sources and output the result as standard RSS 2.0. Since the result is RSS 2.0 you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. The big advantage is the user can not just assemble information from different source but can filter, analyze the content to get what he need. You can also create pipes that accept user input.

Yahoo has built the pipes out of their YUI and the interface is good. They have made it quite simple for the users to create pipes and get their job done. Another interesting part is that you can share, edit others pipes! So you can learn from what others have made already or if you are lazy just click on “Save a copy” ;) Creating your own pipe can be done in few minutes. All you have to do is specify an input which can be from a feed, flickr, yahoo search etc. Your input can also be taken from a form i.e., text box, data, location, numbers etc. Once you have your inputs you need to process the data that is input! Pipes provide Operators that can filter, truncate, loop through, sort and much more. Final the output of the pipe is provided to the user.

I just tried making a simple search pipe and did it in less than 5 min flat! Definitely pipes were not made to do simple search but that was my first yahoo pipe! I recommend yahoo pipes you all those who relay on feed and have lot of sources.