Hack Day at Yahoo

John Musser, October 3rd, 2006

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Sounds like everyone had a great time at Yahoo!’s Hack Day. About 400 people spent 24 hours on the Yahoo! campus of not just hacking (as expected), but also an unannounced 90 minute performance from Beck. See this post from Chad Dickerson, the Hack Day Blog, and this news story for more (in the latter it’s all referred to as “Computer coding savants fueled by pizza, beer and rock music”).

According to emcee Mike Arrington there were over 50 projects in the hacking competition and the winner was Blogging in Motion, a hardware-and-software mashup using a camera, a handbag, a pedometer, and the Flickr API in order to automatically blog photos every few steps.

Oh yes, and Yahoo! release two new APIs and announced a third:

• Browser Based Authentication or BBAuth: which is as they describe “a generic mechanism that will allow users to grant 3rd party web-based applications access their Yahoo! data…it possible to use Yahoo! as a single sign-on for your site, thus removing a barrier to entry for a whole lot of people (over 200 million to be exact).” Looks like a very useful service, somewhat similar to Google’s authentication service released earlier this year. More from Jeremy Zawodny and Dan Theurer
• Yahoo! Photos API: This new API uses the “Enables Yahoo! users to access and manipulate their photos through third-party applications and devices. They can use Yahoo! Photos Web Services to upload photos, create and modify photos and albums, share photos with others, search photos, and more.” And it builds on the BBauth services above.
• Yahoo! Mail API: Announced but not yet released. Should be interesting.

Congratulations to Chad and the folks from Yahoo!’s dev team on putting together an excellent event and to continuing to roll-out more useful APIs.