It’s always nice to be around a throng of smart people, but when those people are developers and those developers are crazy creative and ready to hack, it makes your day even better. Hackday 08 has finally arrived!
Since Web 2.0 Expo, a few trickles of information has been coming out about what we’re planning, from Yahoo! joining the OpenSocial foundation as a founder to our provisioning OpenIDs, there *is* an effort there to open up. Yesterday Yahoo! unveiled a glimpse at what you can expect from us in the coming months. Many of us have been head-down on parts of this initiative for quite a while and have been dying to spill the beans (and you know how difficult it is for a blogger to keep secrets!), but I’m glad a nice chunk of it is finally out in the open (no pun intended).
A few of the cool APIs that enable this more open Yahoo! have already been released (SearchMonkey, BOSS ($3K Mashable Contest), Address Book, FireEagle, GeoPlanet, Music, etc.) but there’s a sneaky peek going on today that gives Hackday developers access to some of the rest of what’s cooking. It includes many of the Y!OS components.
- Social Directory API (access user profile data and relationships)
- Contacts (as you might get, this one gives you info about user’s contacts)
- Status (again, obviously, allows you to get info about user’s status)
- Updates (lifestream API)
- App Platform (or YAP, as we call it, let’s you build apps on Yahoo! using the social graph here)
I worked on the YAP team from Nov-May and I can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally share at least a glimpse of this one. Being a part of something that allows developers to reach Yahoo!’s massive audience, and enrich our user experience in the meantime, has been awesome. Today devs are being given the opportunity to build apps and see them running on Mail and My Yahoo. Just a preview, but hey, that means our Hackday peeps are *exclusive*. 😉
The rest of today will be filled with deep dives on particular APIs and some unconf-type sessions from 3-5, then there’s a band tonight (not allowed to blog who it is just yet). We’ll hack all night and begin presentations tomorrow afternoon. I’ve gotta run because I need to scout out where I’m camping tonight. More later!