We’ve pushed even more documentation and tools live at developer.yahoo.com, including documentation of our new YOS social apis as well as YQL (Yahoo! Query Language).  After working on this behind the firewall for so long, it’s great to finally release it and see coverage like this article in Mashable coming in.

I’m off for Sun Valley tomorrow, on the eve of VCIR Fall - the Venture Capital in the Rockies Fall conference.

I love participating in events revolving around startups and funding, and this one promises to be exceptional, given an active group of VC’s and entrepreneurs from around the region, and a region I think is really enjoying a startup culture growth spurt from Boulder to Missoula. The format is one day of startup company presentations interspersed with talks from Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, HP, and others, bookended by socializing and networking evenings.

OK, I’m sure the setting won’t be bad either, though I have a bit of a dilemma in that my cold weather and flyfishing gear won’t fit in the same weekend bag. Oh well, I guess I’ll be cold!

If you’re in the area - or even just interested - come check it out.

I’m thrilled to see this coming to fruition: the OpenSocial Foundation is now live.  Details - including ways to get involved - can be found here.

In attending this SDForum SearchSIG event tuesday night, I was keen to learn what Wikia, FriendFeed, Mahalo, and Facebook were doing about social search. As it turns out - and as I pointed out during the Q&A to lively discussion (which I think was recorded but doesn’t seem to be posted yet) - the answer is nothing much.

My premise in making that comment was that social search be defined as a search deriving its results from “a statistically meaningful sample of people meaningfully related to me”. I gave as an example Zagat’s guide to NYC restaurants, which, back in the day, was exactly that - a usefully large group of, mostly, actual foodies.

Mahalo, imho, is simply an extension of the editorial approach into semi-pro range. Instead of one food editor of the NYTimes, you could have, I don’t know, 10?, editors of the NYC pages. Wikia, simply the cult of the amateur doing the same thing. In both cases, these are curated results pages. If the curators are competent, passionate, and/or otherwise motivated, this is great and a step forward from algorithmic results. But making better results pages ain’t social search.

Neither is telling me what my friends think. Sure twitter lazyweb is a great way to get a recommendation for an indian restaurant in Palo Alto, but it’s a lousy way to get one for a dentist in missoula. Especially if you don’t live there and have a bunch of friends there.

Even del.icio.us and other “social search 1.0″ tools are still, more or less, dumb boxes of votes. Those votes are by smart people and often people like me (hence why I find delicious popular interesting), but there’s no variability on a given query on the axis of “social”. And, like mahalo and wikia, the results are mostly url’s - i.e. links to other pages where you as often as not have to execute another search or dig through socially undifferentiated data to extract value (a link to a restaurant page on yelp, for example, with a bunch of reviews from people I don’t know or trust).

There are a bunch of tools that let you ask questions of people. LinkedIn does a great job of this, again within a specific community, but they are very clever in the way things can seep out beyond the first degree network without hitting the undifferentiated population of “everyone”. That said, it’s still an expansion of “me”, on the assumption that my business colleagues and their business colleagues are to some degree usefully alike. While somewhat true, this is not nearly as useful as a larger population of people “like me,” who might or might not be related to me socially.

Lijit is doing a similarly interesting and useful job of letting me search the corpus read by my network, and with a little help from MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, my network’s network. Lijit is awesome, and I often use it to search my own stuff.
But what I really would like to see from “social search” is something that can search my network/neighborhood AND search other neighborhoods like mine, where “like mine” is pivotable based on context (friends, business, geo, special need, etc.). Like last.fm for stuff other than music maybe.

(I’m barely commenting on Friendfeed and Facebook because, to date, those are seredipitous discovery tools more than search ones, and ultimately you’re mostly finding people, not useful data derived from groups of people.)

Is anyone doing anything interestingly like this?

This is a project I’ve been helping drive for a while, and I’m happy to see it come to fruition: Yahoo! user address books are now officially portable. (Additional coverage: TechCrunch, Techmeme, and a great interview with Joseph Smarr at Plaxo.)

Developers can build against it on a self-serve basis (no BD deal needed for basic use), enabling users to import their address books or pieces of data from it. We also have a sync interface for approved partners. Access is via bbAuth, enhancing user security (and will likely be via oAuth at some point in the future).

The key news here is Yahoo! is making this data freely available, on the assumption that it’s the users’ data - not Yahoo!’s. As you look at this alongside the openness of some of our other social API’s (e.g. MyBlogLog), there’s a consistent theme here in that Yahoo! is not trying to “own” this data, but is rather following the O’Reilly maxim of creating more value than we collect — and letting that value inure to users and the developers building stuff for them.

Watch this space — you’ll be seeing more of that theme.

New West has a newly redesigned homepage.

They continue to do a nice job blurring the boundaries between newsroom journalism and web2.0 formats like blogs and user-generated content. The latest version is more consciously built around aggregation — of their own stories, and of user comments and contributions — blended nicely together and presented seamlessly.

It also includes a very nicely done custom headline roll powered by Newsgator that is very intuitive and never mentions the letters RSS. I’ve embedded Courtney’s full tour below UPDATE: not embedded ’cause it breaks my blog - go see it here.

While admittedly I’m not unbiased, I think New West is doing a great job pushing the medium in ways that leverage but take the geekiness out of the technologies we’re all convinced will transform mainstream media. Plenty of other newspapers and online media outlets could learn a thing or two from them.

Congrats to all my friends at New West! Readers, if you’ve never visited, check them out.

Jeff Nolan’s surprisingly bitchy post about Yahoo prompted me to blog on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s the interesting challenge of doing external relationship development in the current tech environment from inside the walls of a public company.

It’s one of the highlights of my job that I get to meet with a lot of startups, developers, VC’s, and industry bloggers (species that are often cross-bred). Many become my conference and cocktail-party familiars, twitter and facebook friends, idea collaborators, daily RSS reads, and even sometimes real friends. Many, of course, do not, but in the course of an average week I connect with dozens of people, a bunch of whom I can dialog usefully with vis-a-vis my job, and many of whom I end up connecting to other parts of Yahoo! Often enough, I connect people to other 3rd-party companies.

Today’s environment is transparent, open, and conversational - meaning almost anyone can get to anyone and communicate with them publicly, semi-publicly, or privately. This is great - when I need to find someone, it tends to be quite easy to reach them directly or with one degree of separation via my network. When someone needs to reach me, I am equally easy to find (and in fact have a public “contact me” email link that’s one click away from a search on my name). As conversations become substantive, companies are increasingly transparent about their objectives, plans, competition, and even finances, all of which materially increase effectiveness.

So much for the good stuff. The challenges are: a) that I’m still under the constraints of a public company, and can not in any way be “conversational” about material inside information; and b) that open doors like mine are magnets for everything from unrelated BU inquiries (from people who should know better) to “the Yahoo! suggestion box”, and the signal-to-noise ratio of inbound items can create a lot of distractions and confusion if I don’t filter aggressively.

We could deal with the first issue the way public companies often do (wait until release and then sic our sales “BD” people on you), but I and many of my colleagues try to operate in the more open mode when we can. In these meetings, we share what we can publicly, are open about our constraints, and sometimes put companies under NDA to discuss more details. Often, however, we do not. People - especially, it seems, web2 types who believe all information should be free — tend to be careless, forgetful, sloppy, and sometimes overtly insubordinate to confidentiality restrictions on information shared under NDA. (Recently, for example, I revealed product plans under NDA, and the recipient not only told a Wired reporter, but introduced me for on-the-record comment!)

In general, I’d rather have a non-confidential conversation anyway. So, we often skip the NDA, we tell you what we can, and we trust that you can deal with the fact there’s information we can’t tell you. If we’re operating in an area close to a given company that we’re talking to, I’ll take pains to make everyone aware of the potential for conflict.

Very often, these kinds of meetings are at our request. Equally often, they’re at the company’s request (or their investors’). Any company that’s been around more than a few cycles will likely have knocked on many doors, been pinged by multiple groups, maybe engaged with corp dev, had their investors tee up various VP’s, etc., trying to push a deal or with a very thinly veiled hope we will acquire them. Very occasionally, these kinds of meetings do lead to immediate deals or m&a conversations, but usually not, and we often can’t say too much more than “interesting, thanks” or “please circle back to us next quarter” or “we’ll engage with you when we’re closer to release”.

Sometimes, we’d really like to say more - about the product fit, about where we see the market going, about ideas that for Yahoo! that cascade from your demo. Or there might be a natural deal that’s two quarters away. Other times, we might find your idea fantastic in the abstract, but don’t see an obvious way plug it into our roadmaps meaningfully given technology / strategy / personnel and any number of other issues. But we often find ourselves in the situation where can’t tell you why or share ideas that reveal our specific plans.

Sometimes people find this frustrating (as Jeff apparently does). Especially once you’ve made the rounds a few times, or as the organization changes over time, this is understandable. But as much as I love newsgator (loyal user, comment on their blog, almost went to work there, etc.), Yahoo! still doesn’t have a product that’s ready-made for an RSS aggregating enterprise media widget and attention data distribution platform. That I can disclose. Yet. (Sorry!)

Particularly when you are solving market problems in a new way, you might not get the response you are looking for on the first (or even nth) visit. Your six-month attempt to sell Yahoo! your solution might not effectively land you on a roadmap that was planned 18 months out. But I would appreciate it if you did not slam me and my colleagues for not saying enough at a meeting, or for not offering a deal to your satisfaction on the spot. That’s how the world works; deal with it or don’t come.

(I would also appreciate it if you would not expect a mid-level manager on my team to provide a substantive comment on the MSFT situation. Does he look like a PR spokesperson or Yahoo! board member? It’s a PUBLIC COMPANY; what do you think we’re going to say in a BD meeting?)

Additionally, it would be nice if the beneficiaries of all these open doors at Yahoo! did not abuse them to end-around deals they’ve been unable to do directly. Or trash us for not being coordinated enough when we hand these end-arounds right back to the BU owners. Or comment negatively about Yahoo’s lack of collaborative culture when we refuse to give out the cell-phone numbers of our colleagues.

Every once in a while, when I’m burned by one of these frustrated or abusive would-be partners, I regret being as available as I am. I guess today’s version of one of my father’s favorite maxims is, “no good deed goes unpublished”. But I know I’ll be greeted with another fantastic or inventive startup tomorrow, and I’m reminded of why I love what I do.

The more interesting alternative to irritable demands and cranky blog posts, of course, is to appreciate the entrepreneurial nature of Yahoo and the people who work there. To know that we are as keen as you to create new and innovative products.  To work with us, using the BD opportunity to build relationships and surface potential solutions. To demonstrate disruptive solutions that help us challenge orthodox ways of thinking about Yahoo! products. To enable us to drive orthogonal intersections across internal channels, even if it means multiple meetings and engagement points. To light a collective fire under any signs of “not invented here” roadmaps.

I’ve always thought that’s what strategic partnerships were all about — it’s certainly what interests me. Believe me, there are lots of people at Yahoo! who are hungry for and receptive to this approach.

So, if the chance to pitch an emerging media solution to a 600-newspaper consortium while they’re in build mode, or to engage the world’s most popular start page in a conversation about your widgets in the run-up to YOS is the kind of opportunity that appeals to you, then we’d love to hear from you.

Again.

It’s very gratifying to at last be able to talk publicly about YOS, Yahoo’s strategy for opening itself to 3rd-party developers across many of its properties and tools.

Dozens of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with have been involved in envisioning, setting strategy for, roadmapping, developing, and rolling out the many elements of this project (and hundreds behind the scenes). It’s by far the most ambitious product initiative I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s been really fun to watch (and help) the entire company align around this — for all the potshots people take at Yahoo!, it really is an incredible market force when it gets fully behind something like this. It’s been even more fun to watch my talented product, design, and engineering colleagues get it built.

In case you weren’t following the detailed announcement at Web2.0, we announced a robust developer application platform offering distribution across many Yahoo properties and views, a suite of social API’s, and a broad initiative to wire “social” into the user experience across the entire company. Of course it’s OpenSocial compliant, as we hinted at in announcing our partnership to develop a foundation around that standard.

I recommend watching this video of Ari Balogh (Y’s CTO) and reading this YDN post if you would like to know more. Only SearchMonkey is live (signup link) so far, but there’s much more coming, and the train is gathering steam.

So stay tuned, and stay in touch if you want to be part of it!

I’m going to let this speak for itself:

Frista updte - Uganda

Frista talked exitedly to me about her brewing process. She is now able to sell over six jerry cans full of her home made brew each week. The loans have enabled her to buy a sugar cane plantation and repair her grinding machine. This has improved the flavour and the efficiency of her beer and she has increased her sales as a result. She sells each jerry can of beer for US$18. She thoroughly enjoys her work and the fact that her customers are always happy (and drunk!). The process of making the beer from sourgum takes about a week and she enthusiastically mimed to me the entire process.

She has recently has to pay the last furneral rite of her late father and now she is able to use all the loans for her business. The business is able to support her and her eight children.

Original post at kiva.org.

For those of my friends who’ve been wondering what I’ve been so heads-down on lately, I’m happy to finally share the news that Yahoo! has announced support for the development of OpenSocial, by working with MySpace and Google to set up an independent foundation for its long-term stewardship. I hope this will turn out to be OpenSocial’s best “container” yet.

OpenSocial is already in the open in the sense that it’s available for use by anyone, and has been since it first came out last November. The spec is published with a Creative Commons license, and there’s reference code put out under an Apache open-source license. There’s been lots of community collaboration on it, and Google has been a good custodian in bringing it this far along.

What putting it in a foundation does is ensure access to the future direction of the spec is open to everyone, and create a way for contributions to be protected from patent lawsuits and IP contamination (for people and companies that have to worry about those arcane but very real kinds of impediment to intellectual collaboration). Most importantly, it means application developers, containers, and would-be contributors alike can take a bet on this technology with the benefit of knowing it’s free (as in beer, and as in speech) forever, that a community of developers is out there building on it, and that they won’t get box-canyoned into proprietary code.

OpenSocial itself still has plenty of maturing to do, but millions of users of twitter, facebook and even old-skool social apps like evite know how great application experiences that tap into your social network can be. Now OpenSocial has every chance to become the Wordpress of social app platforms and yield a similarly rich ecosystem of innovation around it. Kudos to Google here - helping OpenSocial take root by putting it out in the open isn’t just a smart thing to do (even though it means giving up “ownership” of it); it’s the right thing to do.
Helping close this deal for Yahoo! has been a great experience for me personally, too. In addition to helping Yahoo! walk the talk, having a lot of fun, and learning more than I ever thought I would about patent non-assertion, I’ve also gotten to know a very smart and passionate bunch of people at Google, MySpace, and my own employer during this.

So I guess now that it’s public, it’s time to join Orkut and add some new folks to my MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo networks - I’m sure they’ll be inviting me to join causes, share restaurant reviews, and throw monkeys soon!

UPDATE: Blog posts are starting to come in. You probably know where to find them, but I particularly like this quote from CNET: “It’s like the Justice League of social media”!