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SAN FRANCISCO–Phase one came last week, when Yahoo launched its new profiles site. Phase two begins next week, when Web developers can start sinking their teeth into Yahoo’s attempt to replace its present static design with one that’s customizable, application-rich, socially connected, and woven into other parts of the Internet.

Developers are essential to what the company calls the Yahoo Open Strategy. Yahoo is building the foundation, but it will be the arrival of others’ applications that will show whether Yahoo’s transformation attempt is fulfilling those hopes.

Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's Audience Products Division

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

“That starts changing Yahoo from a walled garden to the best of the Web,” said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Audience Product Division, speaking to reporters at Yahoo’s Brickhouse site here Friday. Patel has a heavy burden: in his new role, he’s responsible for a major part of Yahoo’s attempt to reverse its fortunes amid a rough economy.

If the strategy works, more people will use Yahoo, and they’ll use it more deeply. “We should see a lot more time spent and bigger engagement with the front page and mail and My Yahoo,” Patel said. “The average Yahoo user who may use two or three things (today) will now start using four or five or six things.”

Applications using the Yahoo foundation can run at Yahoo or outside it, and Yahoo will release a software developer kit to help programmers get started.

For example, when a commenter is posting on a publisher’s Web site, the publisher could offer the commenter an option to have that activity broadcast on his stream of activity on Yahoo. That would let the commenter share what he’s up to with his contacts while exposing the publisher’s site to more potential readers.

Another example–indeed, the winner of the Yahoo Open Hack 2008 programming contest augmented Yahoo Mail to present all photos a person has sent or received into photo albums. More photos are shared daily on Yahoo than are uploaded to the company’s Flickr photo-sharing site, Patel said, so moves like this could open new windows of activity on Yahoo properties.

New developer tools
Yahoo has opened some developer-oriented projects already, notably BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) for repackaging Yahoo search results, and SearchMonkey for adding new depth and pizzazz to Yahoo’s search results, but those were narrower in scope. At some point next week–Yahoo won’t promise which day exactly–the more powerful tools will go live at the Yahoo Developer Network.

Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief architect for platforms

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

There are three broad categories of technology that developers will get access to next week. At the base is a social platform that applications can use to draw upon Yahoo users’ social connections–as long as users have given permission. While sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace capitalized on the social-networking phenomenon, Yahoo argues that it already has the social data built into its properties. It’s now a matter of bringing it to the fore so applications and users can draw on that information.

“The idea is to create a single social experience that can be shared,” said Jay Rossiter, head of the Yahoo Open Strategy.

One oft-cited example is a revamped Yahoo Mail that spotlights mail from people’s close contacts. If you spend a lot of time e-mailing your boyfriend, mom, or college roommate, chances are you’ll want to know when they e-mail back.

One level above the social plumbing is the foundation for running applications, called the Yahoo Application Platform. Initially, Yahoo will house standalone applications, but as third parties’ products mature, they’ll also be able to run on Yahoo users’ profile pages, My Yahoo pages, and other locations. Some will even run on the Yahoo.com home page, as long as they can meet tough requirements for high performance.

This diagram shows various components developers can use to work with the Yahoo Open Strategy.

(Credit: Yahoo)

And the third level is the services level. Here, Yahoo provides the Yahoo Query Language, a close relative to the Structured Query Language many use to extract data from databases. YQL is designed to make it easier for programmers to extract and process data from Yahoo and many other Web sites, and Yahoo says it’ll do the heavy lifting to make the data workable through YQL.

Overshare?
Of course, users might get the willies thinking about just how much their own activity is becoming part of the information flow of the Internet. Do you really want an application sharing what you do with your friends or indeed the entire world?

Yahoo doesn’t want any privacy surprises, though. Each new application must declare to the user exactly what Yahoo services it wants to use and must obtain the users’ permission to do so through a “scary” warning screen: the more services, the more exclamation mark alerts are shown–an interface designed to encourage developers to use the bare minimum and to ensure that users know what they’re getting into, said Neal Sample, Yahoo’s chief architect for platforms.

“Yahoo’s going to put up essentially another skull and crossbones” for each service the application uses, Sample said.

And users will have fine control over what’s shared or not. People will be able to broadcast what music they’re listening to publicly while confining their movie habits only to close friends, for example.

Some socially connected services will require signed-in participation from both a Yahoo user and outsiders. For example, a person could selectively share photos without making them public, and those viewing the photos would have to sign in. Today, such a move requires that all people be Yahoo members, but the company will add a fast, lightweight registration process that can use any e-mail address.

Yahoo, of course, hopes receiving invitations from Yahoo members effectively will upsell those outsiders to Yahoo services. “It’s valuable for Yahoo to have a way to draw more users into Yahoo,” Rossiter said.

Read more from the original source:
Yahoo to expose its wiring to developers next week

Mozilla Labs on Monday announced that it will form a new group that will focus on the research and development of Web developer tools.

According to Mozilla, the new group will create Web development tools that will help developers increase productivity, create a better user experience, and most importantly, promote the use of open standards.

“We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards,” a Mozilla spokesperson said in a blog post. “Everything is on the table, from services to software, and we’re looking forward to working with Web developers from around the world to create, experiment and play with new ideas.”

So far, little is known about what will come out of Mozilla’s Developer Tools Lab, but the company did announce that it hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian and the Ajax Experience, to lead the initiative.

Original post:
Mozilla launches Developer Tools Lab for the open Web

Facebook is moving to the next step of its $10 million FBFund developer grant program, the company announced Friday in a blog post by employee Catherine Lee. The first round, announced early in August, is now closed, and 25 winning proposals will be announced on September 22; 5 final winners will be chosen out of all first-round winners who apply for the second round, and winners will wind up with grant money between $25,000 and $250,000.

“Our team has been busy reviewing each submission and we’re amazed and excited by what we’ve seen,” Lee wrote. “We’re blown away by the remarkable amount of creativity, dedication, and hard work put into each application. The competition is intense!”

FBFund was first devised by Facebook last year, with cash provided by company investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund, as a way to encourage developers to create high-quality applications for its platform. It hit an early snag, however, when Facebook abruptly voided existing applicants and asked that they re-apply while agreeing to a new set of fine print. FBFund’s initial round gave away 10 developer grants, which were announced at the company’s F8 conference in July. But those applications–which include wedding planner ConnectedWeddings, game creator HotBerry, and carpool organizer Zimride–were not selected in a contest process.

Several applicants for this year’s round of FBFund have made their pitches available on the Web: e-commerce gifting service Real Gifts, contacts management system Socialfly, and greeting card creator GroupCard.

Continued here:
Facebook: 600 developers applied for funding

At DemoFall, Mapflow demonstrated its iPhone application, designed to automate carpooling. The product was just one of many shown built around the iPhone at the event.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN DIEGO–At Demo and DemoFall, there are always easily identifiable trends among the dozens of companies chosen to present their products.

In previous iterations of the events that I’ve attended, those trends have been photo-sharing services, online video hosting, Web 2.0, and the like.

This week, the trend–at least as I’ve seen it–has been the number of companies here with iPhone applications. Not every one of them is talking prominently about the applications they have, but Demo lead organizer Chris Shipley told me informally that she thinks that there must be at least a couple dozen companies with iPhone applications here out of the 72 total presenters.

I’ll be the first to admit that I was slow to understand the value of iPhone apps, and I suppose that’s because it took me awhile to buy one of the devices, and even longer after I did before I started trolling the Apple App Store looking for the best and brightest of what was out there.

My major introduction to the applications was a day I spent last month in Seattle, basically letting a series of them control my life for a day. And more recently, I have found myself blown away by some of the most simple applications imaginable. For example, Showtimes determines where you are and then comes up with a list of movie theaters–sorted by proximity to you–and shows the films showing at each and the times for each film.

As I said, it’s totally simple, and pure genius.

Ultimately, while other mobile phones have many of the features of the iPhone, I don’t think that there will be any others in the near future that combine GPS, a great interface, the power of an operating system like OS X, and a network of developers eager to reach out to an audience of users as devoted to their devices as iPhone owners.

Back here at DemoFall, there is definitely no shortage of companies that have developed applications for the device, and some of them seem very promising to me, even though most have yet to appear in the App Store.

I have my own ideas, as I stated above, why I think iPhone apps are the future of software, but I thought these developers would have opinions even more valuable than mine, since they’re building businesses around the platform.

WebDiet built an iPhone application designed to help people find restaurants that serve the kind of healthy food they want to eat.

(Credit: WebDiet)

Among the companies incorporating the iPhone into their Demo products are WebDiet, Telnic, SkyData, The Echo Nest, and Rudder.

“Right now, (the iPhone is) the platform with the most immediacy,” said Richard Bryce, CEO of Mapflow, a company here with a product centered around an iPhone app. “Especially for the consumer market.”

It’s easy to see why Bryce would think so.

Mapflow is a very interesting product designed around the idea of helping drivers offset the high costs of gas by finding people who need rides to pay to fill empty seats in their cars.

“Most of our lives are ad hoc,” Bryce said. “We’re trying to apply the iPhone’s smart technology to give that ad hoc, on-demand capability to carpooling.”

The Mapflow system works by letting drivers define routes–either one-time, or repeat–they’re following and the number of seats they have available to fill. The iPhone makes it simple to do this through lists that can be easily displayed and because the phone’s GPS chip quickly determines where the driver is in proximity to anyone looking for a ride.

It might sound weird to pick up strangers in this manner, but Mapflow requires that all users register with their name, a photo, and a credit card, and that means that drivers can feel confident that whomever they pick up is probably going to be safe. And when they arrive to pick up the rider, the iPhone displays the rider’s picture so the driver can be sure the person is who he or she is supposed to be.

In addition, drivers and riders alike can choose preferences for the type of person with whom they want to travel. This means, for example, that women can choose to ride only with other women.

Further, the service has a quick and easy rating system–again, enabled by the iPhone’s elegant interface–that allows everyone to weigh in on the people with whom they’ve traveled.

Riders pay about 30 cents a mile to use the system, and Mapflow makes its money from a 15 percent commission on the transactions. Drivers pocket the rest.

Clearly, there are many questions the company must answer before the product becomes profitable–and of course, it must first release the application, which it plans to do in about four weeks. But this seems to me to be a very good use of the device, especially given the growing emphasis on getting people to stop driving one to a car.

Another company relying on the iPhone for a product unveiled at DemoFall is Dial Directions.

Say Where, an iPhone app from Dial Directions, aims to give iPhone users the ability to employ speech recognition to get information from services like Yelp and MapQuest.

(Credit: Dial Directions)

This company’s Say Where app is designed to give iPhone users a way to get geographic information from several services–Yelp, YellowPages.com and Ask.com among them–by simply saying into the device’s microphone where they want to go.

The Say Where software is based on voice recognition technology and in this case relies on the quality of the iPhone microphone, suggested Dial Directions co-founder Amit Desai.

Even more important given the geographical nature of the application is the iPhone’s ability to know where it is at any given time, either through the GPS chip in the 3G model or its triangulation ability on the earlier model.

Another company, Blue Lava Technologies, is incorporating the iPhone into the I Love Photos product, which it unveiled at DemoFall Monday.

That product is a photo sharing and tagging service designed to help people automatically build in more contextual meaning to the thousands of digital photos they take.

This works in part by having people tag photos of people, especially those in their address books, with their names. Then, the software is able to append those tags to other pictures of the same people.

Blue Lava director of user experience Cory Shaw said that the iPhone was a natural device to develop, in part because, for now, I Love Photos is only available on the Mac.

The iPhone is “the perfect tool for what we’ve…built,” said Shaw. “Just because the Mac and the iPhone (are) so well integrated with your address book. And just (because the iPhone has the) ability to snap photos. It’s just a natural progression because of what we’ve already built.”

See the rest here:
iPhone apps a major trend at DemoFall

Why not use a web app to create your web app startup? And what’s more, why deal with all the physical realities of incorporating a company and setting up its accounting system when you can visualize the whole thing? That’s the proposition of Fairsoftware.net, which debuted an alpha version of its online startup creation application today at TechCrunch50.

(Credit: FairSoftware.net)

While other web apps help you find people for your startup, FairSoftware goes several steps further by letting you, as the founder, parcel out pieces of the online revenue collected via PayPal by FairSoftware your startup (hopefully) generates.

The more shares of a startup you own within FairSoftware, the larger your share of revenue. The software lets you make provisions for those pesky unvirtualized expenses businesses have, and then pipes the revenue to each founder in accordance with their shares, less FairSoftware’s 9.9% cut.

(Credit: FairSoftware.net)

There are interesting aspects to the virtualized startup you create: you can bring other people to a project and pay them in shares, and if the project generates revenues this means real money in their pockets. You can either hire for the long term, vesting new staff with permanent shares, or pull in temporary expertise who get a share of the revenue until the task is completed.

I tried the product and found a lot to like:

• While still in alpha, the Web app worked without a glitch from signup to being ready to count my incoming money.
• Developers, web designers and professionals with skills startups need can join FairSoftware, hook up with multiple projects and both make money and earn a lasting piece of the action.
• FairSoftware’s open (to a project’s founders) accounting system and one share, one vote mechanism should moderate one of the main reasons startups go belly up: disagreements between founders.

Since you are not actually incorporating a company when you create a project, FairSoftware’s legal foundation is something it calls its Software Bill of Rights, which spells out each how the system works. Alain Raynaud, CEO of FairSoftware, pointed out that the founders could “graduate” to being an actual subchapter C corporation if they so choose.

If FairSoftware takes off, and can survive the inevitable legal challenges that arise when people, money and who gets what come into play, this could become a standard infrastructure product for technology startups.

Go here to read the rest:
FairSoftware virtualizes startups