Today we announced one new API (Shopping 2.0) and future availability of three others (read/write Photos API, read/write Calendar API, and a read/write MyWeb API). The new Shopping API lets you drill down into comparison shopping search results more deeply by using product categories, so instead of searching for "shoes" you can start at the category of "men’s shoes" and search within that. Handy!
The Photos API, Calendar API, and MyWeb API, which will be available soon, all share a capability which is new for us. We call this Browser-Based Authentication. It’s a way to enable third-party software developers to get access to your personal Yahoo! data (like your photos, your calendar, or your links) through their applications without having to handle your password or user name. It’s super secure because the user only authenticates at login.yahoo.com (we pass back an encrypted token to the developer that lets them make calls to personalized APIs on the user’s behalf). The user is in complete control; she can revoke permission from the developer at any time.
I’ll be posting more about this (including examples) as these APIs become available and as people start writing applications based on them. For now this is just a "heads up" to give people a sense of where we’re going with this. We’re moving into a very interesting new phase with Web services.
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Cool – does this mean that other apps can use a Yahoo! login for their authentication system, even if they’re not using any of Photos et al APIs?
No, this isn’t intended to be Passport redux. (That is a much bigger problem and it’s not one we’re tackling with this.)
The intention is simply to enable authenticated access to Yahoo! Web services from third-party applicaions.
Yahoo Application Gallery
The Yahoo Developer Network just launched an Application Gallery. Similar to the Widgets Gallery, this site shows off the best applications built on top of the Yahoo APIs. There’s the opportunity to upload and submit your applications to the gallery…
Man you guys are rolling out the goodies for developers, I love it.
Will there be a licensing tier for commercial use of the photos API?
Jason Levitt mentioned that browser-based authentication to me and I’m impatient to learn more.
Have you published your powerpoint slides from ETech? (I’d appreciate if you could shoot me an email with the url if you have, thx)
Slides from all my recent talks can be found at http://redblazer.com/talks/.
As 2006 draws to a close with no release, do you think a Yahoo Calendar API is still planned?
Thanks, Jeffrey
Since I don’t work for Yahoo anymore I can’t say for sure, but I sure hope so!