Laughing Meme

I didn’t make it to the keynote to see our new CTO speak (meetings that morning), but it was very strange, bordering on deeply surreal to watch the video of it.

1. Interesting to see my “Flickr is the 2nd largest API ” meme work its way up the tree. I didn’t make that factoid up per se, and I’d probably stand behind it if pushed, but I did reason from very limited data. (also AWS screws up the story, is utility computing an API?)

2. Still haven’t quite adjusted to the transition of OAuth from being a personal project that the “Paranoids” (official title of Yahoo’s internal security experts) were angry at me for working on (against Yahoo policy for Yahoos to work on security related projects), to a the company wide standard, at least on paper.

Other folks are talking about and writing about the long germinating, launched in beta, location broker from Yahoo’s Brickhouse, Fire Eagle.

I wanted to call out just a couple of the cool, and non-intuitve decisions they made.

Is NOT a consumer brand

Fire Eagle is a service for building and sharing location data. Its the application built on top of it that you’ll interact with, unless you’re building stuff.

Fire Eagle does NOT manage the social graph

Its a service for sharing your data with friends (or services, or your toaster), but it doesn’t know who your friends are. The social graph has been outsource. Best example of a small piece loosely joined I’ve seen in a long time.

Cares about privacy and ease of use

Ninja privacy is built in. But you don’t have to care. The TOS requires developers to discuss how the data is used. And privacy levels are front and center. And from day one data is delete-able, and in fact data is flushed on a regular basis.

Built on OAuth

Yay!

The Yahoo OP is officially live today! Congrats to Shreyas and Allen for shepherding this for many months!

If you’re a Flickr user you can your photos URL (http://flickr.com/photos/yourname), or if you’re signing into a RP that supports XRDS, just use flickr.com.

You’ll also want to visit openid.yahoo.com, and click on “Get Started” and customize your OpenID identifier.

Personally I just use laughingmeme.org as my OpenID. I had to futz around a bit to figure out OpenID 2.0’s slightly different syntax, but if you view source on this blog you’ll now see in the header:

<link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth">
<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellan">

“Pipes has all the ingredients of something that should really set me off. Pipes, filters, mashups, RSS, Atom, RDF — (singing) these are a few of my favorite things! So, what gives? I’m genuinely worried that I’m sick, depressed, losing it, or otherwise replaced by a pod alien. Possibly all the above. … So, it’s not you, it’s me.” - Les - Thoughts on Pipes on the Web

Yeah, exactly that.

I’ll be staying overnight next Friday, along with 500 or so our closest friends at open Hack Day.

If you’re coming, may I humbly suggest you do not place your caffeine needs at the tender mercies of Big Purple. Bring your own, bring some to share, you’ll be popular. (truth be told, they do that whole “soda” thing ok, but the coffee is beyond mention)

And if someone gives me a lift, I’d be happy to bring my Zojirushi, and Saeco

Les is going to be joining del.icio.us here in the happy valley, while Hugo has left the W3C(!?!?!) to join as well.

(And soon, we’ll return to some non-Yahoo-centric blogging)

Showed up at Microformats party last night and promptly fell asleep in my drink (long day), but this is the real action. Andy and Y!Local have rolled out hCard, hCal, and hReview to all of Yahoo Local.

And Gordon has whipped up the first microformat -> to Y! bridge with Greasemonkey.

Nice.

Starting May 22nd.

update [2006/5/23]: It was pointed out to me today that I was a bit opaque with this announcement. As of yesterday I’m working at Flickr out of the Santa Clara office, and living in San Francisco.

Btw you know you’ve arrived at a large company when a hundred people turn up for the weekly new hire orientation.

Presumably the new del.icio.us feature “Your Network” is just the start of a roll out as it falls a bit short of the hope and promise from Joshua’s talk at Berkman last year.

Two most critical missing features * tags from my network (otherwise I just have a new link stream to drown in) * what did my network think of this link? (as an API!)

Also I want multiple networks. * if the brilliance of del.icio.us is it allows me to simply express the various vectors of my interest, shouldn’t my interest in having someone in my network (which is opaque, and 1-directional, and definitionally about interest, not squishy social stuff) have as rich an expressive language?

Great quote from Thomas Hawk comparing image search engines

“If I were Google and Microsoft right now I’d be thinking about where I could find about 2 million or so users to rank my pictures on the cheap rather than wasting time on all this other stuff.”.

Still I think 2006+ is going to be about rediscovering that smart computers can help us get value from the rankings of handful of personally relevant opinions as well as 2M strangers in aggregate.

update [2006/4/3]: It was pointed out to me that Google has a stake in von Ahn’s ESP game (not to mention a whole new CMU/Pittsburgh lab focusing on data mining and AI).