John Musser, September 13th, 2007 Comments(2)

Just yesterday we saw how mashups can become aqusition targets and today we see how a company’s internal mashups can become part of their external products. Yahoo’s vice president of Yahoo’s advanced development Bradley Horowitz has just announced that two innovative projects created during an internal Yahoo “Hack Day” event earlier this year, have been integrated into two of their larger properties: Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Shopping.

Yahoo Shop by Color: Now part of Yahoo Shopping, this lets shoppers find products in the color they want by using a color palette of 56 different hues. The palette scans more than 10 million products in the Yahoo Shopping catalogue, including apparel, beauty, home and garden, and electronics categories. If you want to shop for blue dresses you see a a live example here and you can see our mashup profile here.

MapMixer: Go to maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer and you can find this slick way to have other maps layered over a Yahoo. Map to show additional detail of a location. Now you can mix together the detail of a point-of-interest map — such as airports, college campuses, sports arenas, historic maps and others. (Our profile here.)

Yahoo’s Hack Days have been quite successful, both these internal versions as well as the external ones like when Beck came to play. Part of the message from this announcement is a reminder that “spirit of innovation that’s alive and well throughout the Yahoo! community”. You can read more on this story at Techmeme.

And certainly Yahoo has lots of APIs to choose from, we have 25 Yahoo APIs listed here.