Jeffrey McManus

Dan wrote an excellent technical article for DevX.com covering our Web services (specifically the Maps Ajax API) and JSON serialization. Great job Dan!

I posted the slides from my eTech talk last week.

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.

We launched the second in an undoubtedly endless series of language-specific developer centers today. Behold the mighty Yahoo! PHP Developer Center. This has all the info and code examples you should need to consume Y! Web services from PHP. And to demonstrate how truly mad we are about the PHP, we began serializing many of our Web services in native PHP format. You don’t need to parse the XML because there is no XML (unless, of course, you want it). It is most excellent.

This is a follow-up to the JavaScript Developer Center we launched back in December and updated last week.

Twice in the last two days I’ve heard someone ask, incredulously, "your team has only been at it for ten months?" In fact, most of the team signed up between June and November of last year. I’m enormously proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish, but I have to say that we get a ton of help from all across the company and that makes all the difference.

They just released a new version of Y! Music engine today. I’ve been using this for about a month on an internal beta and it’s a huge improvement over the first version, especially in the area of queueing up and downloading songs and managing playlists.

The list of new and updated features is here. (I am pretty sure you’ll get the new version automatically if you have an older version installed.) Update: No auto-update for this one, my bad. You gotta download by clicking the link. But it is well worth it! Ian reminds me that there’s a blog post with lots of detailed info on what’s new in the new version here.

Jason’s got a terrific piece on using JSON Web services to create AJAX Web applications. We figured that he would be the perfect person to write this since the acronym is named after him*.
*Not really.

I need to go pick up a hard drive after work today, so since I was looking up the address of the Sunnyvale Fry’s store anyway, I copied and pasted all their Bay Area stores into my MapMaker spreadsheet template and made a Yahoo! Map of Bay Area Fry’s Electronics stores. Enjoy!

Very exciting to see that Yahoo! Widgets, del.icio.us and Flickr made the Lifehacker Best Apps of 2005 list today.

It’s been fun and inspiring to work with the Widgets and Flickr teams in 2005 and I’m looking forward to doing more with del.icio.us in 2006 now that they’re part of our pulsating purple family. And big thanks to Lifehacker for all the love you’ve shown us this year!

We launched some new web services APIs for Yahoo! Travel today, Dan has details on his blog and the documentation is here. These new APIs support the JSON serialization format we announced last week. Party!

Read more »

Today we launched a new feature of Yahoo! Search called Open Shortcuts. This lets you do certain types of searches quickly. It’s also customizable. For instance, to search eBay from the Yahoo! search page:

1. Go to search.yahoo.com (or any convenient Yahoo! search box)
2. In the search box, type !ebay shoes
3. You’ll be taken to eBay where you’ll see search results for all the lovely shoes that are available on eBay

You can also define your own shortcuts in the search box. I made my own shortcut to search the Yahoo! Developer Network site by following these steps:

1. Go to http://search.yahoo.com/osc/create

 

2. In the ‘name’ box, enter the name of the shortcut (in this case, ‘dev‘)

 

3. In the ‘URL’ box, enter:

  http://search.yahoo.com/search?vs=developer.yahoo.net&va=%s

The "%s" is a special character that specifies that you should replace this with whatever you entered in the search box.

To save the shortcut, click on the Set button.

Now when you go to any Y! search box you can enter !dev javascript (or whatever) and you’re taken to search results for ‘javascript’ on the Yahoo! Developer Network site.

Remember that this works from any Yahoo! search box, including the search boxes you find at the top of nearly every Yahoo! page, as well as the Yahoo! search box in Firefox, etc.

I’m pretty sure you have to be logged in to Yahoo! for this to work.

There is also a shortcut for creating shortcuts, it’s the ’set’ command. I used this to create a search shortcut for MSDN (Microsoft’s developer site):

!set msdn http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-online/shared/components/mscomsearch30.aspx?qu=%s

(That should be all entered in the box as one entry; it looks like it’s going to word-wrap on this page.)

Read more »

As I walk the earth attempting to fulfill my mission of helping software developers do their thing, I’ve stumbled upon a few important truths. One of these truths is that even though we aspire to an open, agnostic world, developers still tend to live in one programming language or another. So it’s good to build out that last mile of support to developers in their language of choice.

So it is with great pride that we roll out the first in a series of language-specific developer centers at Yahoo! — the Yahoo! JavaScript Developer Center. This is a collection of links, articles and code examples intended for use by Javascript developers who are interested in using Yahoo! technology to build applications. Our support for Javascript is vast — from AJAX applications, to widgets, to Maps, there’s quite a lot there.

One of the gems of today’s launch is our support for JSON. This is a Web services paradigm that makes it much easier for developers to create AJAX applications that run in the browser without the need for an intermediate proxy server, by safely bypassing cross-browser scripting restrictions. It’s a super cool and easy way to create dynamic applications that use Yahoo! web services in Javascript.

I don’t normally like to preannounce products, but I should mention that we are working on a few more interesting additions to the JavaScript developer center that we’ll add soon. We are also planning additional language-specific developer centers (PHP and .NET are a few that we’re interested in making available soon).

Finally, the most excellent Laura of my team pulled all this today and burned the midnight oil to create new content for the center. I’m sure you’ll agree that she did a terrific job. If you have feedback or would like to ask questions about our offerings for Javascript developers, please join our Javascript developers Yahoo! group.

Very exciting to see del.icio.us joining Yahoo! today.

They’ve got XML APIs as well as a JSON interface, which means that as of today, we’re supporting them on the Y! Developer Network, hooray!

JSON is a very interesting way to build AJAX applications without having to proxy the Web service data on your own server; with JSON, you pull down a JavaScript object directly to the browser client instead of retrieving an XML document, formatting that into HTML on your server, and blasting that page to the client.

Connect the dots: Flickr, Upcoming.org, blo.gs, del.icio.us. What do they have in common? They all had APIs for developers in place before we bought them. Something to ponder.

Just released a new version of my Excel spreadsheet that lets you plot data on a Yahoo! Map, this makes an adjustment to get around a server side change that made the template unusable by just about everybody. It’s now fixed, hooray!

People have asked me to add geocoding to this and I’ll try to get around to adding that, maybe over the holidays. I also want to add the ability to specify custom icons for each map position, which shouldn’t be too difficult.

I’m looking to hire a product manager to join the developer network team at Yahoo. We’re looking for someone pretty senior and technical, preferably with lots of experience working with developers and web services. Click the link below for the full description; drop me a line (my first name and last name @ yahoo.com) if you or someone you know is interested.

Read more »

  radar-map by jeffreymcmanus.

This is just amazing…Justin did a few fully interactive skins on top of our new maps product to demonstrate how you can use Flash to tailor maps to look like your web site.

Yahoo! Local GM and amateur blog critic Paul Levine and I are in IMs right now, watching the returns on the launch meander through the blogosphere via Technorati.

Paul Levine: btw, when you talk about only-at-yahoo features, i usually point to 5:
Paul Levine: 1) multi-point directions
Paul Levine: 2) drag-and-drop interactivity
Paul Levine: 3) reverse business lookup
Paul Levine: 4) address book integration / autocomplete
Paul Levine: 5) minimap
Paul Levine: plus things like traffic and send-to-phone which we launched almost a year ago and still noone else has
Jeffrey McManus: somebody should blog all that
Paul Levine: yea — who?
Jeffrey McManus: if only we knew somebody with a blog
Paul Levine: ha

New Yahoo! Maps release.

Also: new Yahoo! Maps APIs for developers, adding both Flash and Ajax APIs, geocoding, traffic, and the ability to embed maps on your own web site.

Party on.

Here’s a new map, this time showing San Diego Trolley stations. I did this because I like trolleys and I like San Diego, and because Gina just moved there and I thought she might be able to use this.

(You’ll recall that in part 1, I plotted the locations of BART stations in honor of the fact that we moved to a new house close to BART.)

I may do Portland next. I’d love to tackle the whole NYC subway system, but copying and pasting that many locations into a spreadsheet* would be quite a task; those folks in the northeast take their rail seriously. Wonder if there’s a way to divide and conquer the work? Maybe I’ll just do the LIRR or Metro North to get warmed up.

*I wrote a spreadsheet tool to create these quickly. You’re welcome to use it too.

Update: Lifehacker calls the spreadsheet tool "fun and addictive" which is excellent because I’ve been trying to get people to call me that since junior high. Also, I got an email from one of our friends north of the border saying that this doesn’t work for Canadian addresses. It should. It’s my bad. I’ll work on that this week and post a revised version when it’s done. (This actually turned out to be pretty easy to fix: feast your eyes on Canadian provincial capitals.)

Excellent review of MyWeb in PC Magazine; Rick Broida calls it "similar to but better than" del.icio.us and "easier to navigate, smarter about organizing tags and bookmarks, and accessible via a toolbar you may already have." Rocking.

In the review he states (um, twice!) that MyWeb requires that you use the Yahoo! Toolbar, which isn’t true. Firefox users can drag the Add2MyWeb bookmarklet to their bookmarks toolbar and easily save pages to MyWeb that way.

Update: Fixed broken link to description of the bookmarklet, sorry ’bout that. Click on the Add2MyWeb link above to go the FAQ and that’ll describe how to use the bookmarklet in both Firefox and IE.

All of BART on a map, yo. I’d have pimped this earlier in the week but I got sidetracked with some other stuff.

I wrote a tool to make creating simple maps like this super easy. I’ll be releasing this tool soon so everybody can play. Until that happens, if you can hack together an XML file and put it on a Web server, you can play, too.