All posts tagged ‘Yahoo’

File Under: Programming, Social, Web Services
Dec
20
2010

Yahoo Looking to Sell, Not Shut Down Delicious

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Good news Delicious fans — Yahoo has finally made something of an announcement, saying that the bookmarking service will not be shut down, but sold off.

Despite a leaked, internal image that listed Delicious and other services in a “sunset” category, Yahoo denies it is planning to shut the bookmarking service down.

The Delicious blog says the service is looking for “a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users.”

According to the same announcement, the tech press is to blame for assuming that “sunset” meant shut down. More likely, Yahoo simply wasn’t ready for the level of backlash that rumors of Delicious’ demise brought about, and now the company is backpedalling.

Yahoo also hasn’t made any announcement regarding MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz or any of the other services listed as “sunset” in the leaked graphic that circulated last week.

Presumably, in some cases, sunset does in fact mean “shut down.”

Still, the word that Delicious will live on in some form is good news for the millions of users and bookmarks the service currently hosts. Unfortunately, Yahoo has not denied that it has laid off the engineers and technical staff behind Delicious.

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File Under: Identity
Oct
29
2010

Flickr Adds Limited OpenID Support

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Large web services from the likes of Google, Yahoo and others love to tout their OpenID support. But when these companies say “support,” sometimes what they mean is that you can use them as an OpenID provider — and store all of your precious personal information on their servers.

What’s much less common from the big companies are sites that let you sign in with OpenID. Today the popular photo sharing site Flickr has taken a small step in that direction.

The site has stopped short of true OpenID support, though that appears to be the end goal. For now its offering a way to sign in with your Google OpenID. Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is using Google’s authentication APIs to power the sign-in experience. Sadly, the new feature is only available for those signing up for Flickr. If you’ve already got a Flickr account, you have to authenticate using your original login.

Given that most of you probably already have Flickr accounts, today’s news isn’t all that exciting. But hopefully, it means the wheels are turning at Flickr and one day you’ll be able to sign in with any OpenID account.

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File Under: Identity, Social
Sep
7
2010

Yahoo Users Can Now Open a Google Account With OpenID

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Google is now letting any Yahoo users sign in to Google using OpenID, the company announced Tuesday.

When you’re signing up for a Google account, there’s now a new button you can click on that says “Verify by signing in at Yahoo.com.” Click it, and you’re sent to Yahoo, where you’re asked to allow Google and Yahoo to link up your accounts.

Tuesday’s development marks Google’s first attempt to be an OpenID relying party — a website that accepts OpenID logins from third-party providers. Also, this only works for Yahoo users for now, but Google says it’s going to start offering support for other OpenID providers soon.

On the surface, this may look like an attempt by Google to poach users away from Yahoo by making it even easier for them to switch. In fact, it’s a real-world example of the type of interoperability that OpenID has been promising to bring to the open web for some time.

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File Under: HTML5, Mobile, Web Apps
Aug
17
2010

Yahoo Mail Switches to HTML5 on the iPad

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Yahoo recently revamped its webmail site to deliver a richer, HTML5-powered experience to iPhone users, and now the company has done the same for iPad users.

Go to the Yahoo Mail website on your iPad and you’ll see the new, fully juiced-up HTML5 version instead of the older mobile version.

Yahoo mail the world’s largest webmail site — it has over 275 million users — but the site lags behind second-runner-up Gmail when it comes to innovation with HTML5 on the iPad and other touchy-swipey browsing devices.

Still, the new Yahoo Mail looks pretty slick. Scrollable photo previews now appear inside e-mail messages, and it supports offline local cache so you can keep working even when you’re out of range.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Apps
Jun
23
2010

New Flickr Is Bigger, Wider and Uncut

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The new Flickr photo page

The grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a revamped design. Photo pages on Flickr have been redone to feature larger images, maps, and a much cleaner, more intuitive interface.

For now, the new look is opt-in, but Flickr plans to make the new page design the default some time next month. To see the new photo page in action, log in to your Flickr account and visit any photo page. You’ll see an option to test the new look. You can also use links provided by Flickr to switch between the two experiences.

Flickr's old look: Click for larger.

It’s been a long time since Flickr did anything major to its main photo pages. Flickr started with a limited set of features and has been bolting new features onto the old design ever since. The result has been a slightly cluttered collection of buttons, tools and bits of data that can distract from the main point of the site — your photos.

The new look changes that, streamlining the navigation and tools while “embiggening” your photos (as Flickr refers to it).

The first thing you’ll notice is that the primary image is much larger. The long edge of your image is now 640 pixels across, a 30 percent increase. If that’s not big enough for you, just hover your mouse over any image and you’ll notice the icon changes to a magnifying glass. Click the image (or the new button between the Newer and Older buttons) and you’ll enter what Flickr calls the Lightbox view.

Similar to popular JavaScript slideshow tools, Flickr’s Lightbox view enlarges the image and overlays your screen with a slightly transparent black background. The nice thing about the new Lightbox view is that you can browse through photos without closing it, as well as leave comments and favorite photos.

Perhaps the single most-useful enhancement to casual viewing found in Flickr’s redesign is the addition of new keyboard shortcuts — yes, left and right arrow will now flip through photos just the way you’d expect. The keyboard navigation works in Lightbox mode as well.

The new look consolidates all the tools previously scattered around the page — adding notes, viewing EXIF data, editing images and a dozen more — into a single Actions dropdown menu. The result is a far less-cluttered page that still offers easy access to anything you’d like to do with your photos.

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File Under: APIs, Location
Feb
15
2010

Yahoo Maps API

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This is the basic structure of a data call to Yahoo Maps’ API. This will draw a 500px by 300px map centered on Wired’s San Francisco offices, complete with zoom and pan controls. When the user clicks on the location marker, a pop-up box will appear with some text inside.

All of these attributes can be changed by modifying the code below. You’ll need to use your own API key.


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File Under: APIs, Location
Feb
15
2010

Using the Yahoo Maps API

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Yahoo’s Maps API may not be as popular as Google’s mashup mainstay, but it has many of the same features. In some ways, it’s even easier to use than Google’s Maps API, so beginners getting started with API interaction might prefer Yahoo’s implementation.

To get started working with Yahoo maps, we’ll simply create a map we can display on a web page, and then add a marker to denote a particular location.


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File Under: APIs, Location
Feb
15
2010

Get Started With the Yahoo HTTP Geocoder API

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Since the major search engines have opened up their mapping tools to programmers, geocoding has become an essential step in the process of building many a mashup.

Geocoding is the process of converting human-readable place data — a city name, ZIP code, or address — to latitude and longitude points that can be easily plotted on a map.

Yahoo’s HTTP Geocoder API is easy to use, and its output is easy to incorporate into your applications. This article will describe its features and show some examples of how to access the results.


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File Under: APIs, Location
Feb
15
2010

Get Local Search Results From Yahoo

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Online maps are a popular way to spice up a site. To get the most use out of them, you need data to plot: addresses from a database, location clicks from the user or at least coordinates for the map’s center. With any map, you have to start somewhere.

If you’re low on data, you can fill in the map with local listings, such as those you’d find in the Yellow Pages. You can show coffee shops or pizza joints right along your other data, or even on its own.

In this tutorial I’ll show how to use Yahoo Local to search for nearby businesses and landmarks, then plot those locations on a Yahoo Map using the Ajax API.

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File Under: APIs, Web Services
Dec
17
2009

Craigslist Reverses Yahoo Pipes Ban, But Developers Have Already Moved On

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Earlier this month, Craigslist blocked Yahoo Pipes from accessing any Craigslist page. As a result, mashups all over the web were suddenly without data. After not responding to inquires, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster eventually posted a terse message on the company’s blog saying that Yahoo Pipes mashups were using “a disproportionate amount of server/bandwidth resources.”Now it would seem that Craigslist has ended its ban of Yahoo Pipes, but for developers we imagine the damage has been done. For its part, the startup Flippity, which was the first to notice its Yahoo Pipe had been blocked, says it has moved on to friendlier sources, rewriting Flippity to use the eBay API. It wasn’t the first time Craigslist has shutdown outsiders trying to improve on the site’s famously antiquated tools — the site previous blocked ListPic, a tool designed to help Craigslist users browse by images, and a tool to search all the Craigslist sites at once. As we said in our initial report on this debacle, if you’re a developer looking for data to use in a mashup, think twice about Craigslist. The site has a wealth of data, but it guards it jealously and has no qualms about blocking even major players like Yahoo. See Also:
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