A presentation by Paul Hammond & Simon Willison, of Yahoo!
Paul and Simon gave us a quick overview of the APIs and offerings available from Yahoo.
[Paul and Simon, a Hacking Double Act]
There were many examples of mashups given, some of which included:
Flickr + Yahoo Maps = geotagged photos
One of the most interesting aspects was Yahoo’s Hack Day (Mash Up Or Shut Up), which is held about once a month. Dreamers, coders and hackers from all sorts of disciplines get together to prototype possible new products. There are only two rules, apparently:
- Build a prototype in a day
- Demonstrate to your colleagues
Basically, for internal and external projects, web services and APIs allow us to build new products faster, and helps innovation. Some products demo’d at a hack day have been in user testing in under a week! This just wouldn’t be possible without published APIs.
The Yahoo Developer Network has loads of information for people wishing to utilise the APIs for:
- Search
- Spelling suggestions
- Term extraction (generating tags from parsed text)
- Output formats such as XML, serialised PHP, JSON
- Flickr
- Maps
etc.
Letting your API out into the wild can lead to some very surprising results! How about fully-draggable Pirate map, courtesy of Justin Everett-Church.
[ Yarr! ]
Or perhaps you need to find a picture from Flickr which matches your sketch – you need Retrievr
[Pimp up my sketch]
All the presentation slides are available at Paul Hammond’s website.
