Archive | yahoo RSS feed for this section

Yahoo! User Interface Library: amazing and free

14 Feb

In my very first days at Yahoo! working with the team that made the Local Events Browser demo using a bunch of Yahoo! APIs, I was really amazed at the Javascript/CSS talent assembled at Yahoo! As of today, a huge chunk of it is out there for anyone to use and the people who created all of it have started a blog. By any standard of openness, you have to admit that the release of the Yahoo! User Interface Library is incredible:

The Yahoo! User Interface Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX. The UI Library Utilities facilitate the implementation of rich client-side features by enhancing and normalizing the developer’s interface to important elements of the browser infrastructure (such as events, in-page HTTP requests and the DOM). The Yahoo UI Library Controls produce visual, interactive user interface elements on the page with just a few lines of code and an included CSS file. All the components in the Yahoo! User Interface Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

If the technology itself wasn’t cool enough already, check out that generous BSD license — “free for all uses.” Getting your hands on the Y! UI Library is incredibly straightforward, too. I just downloaded the zip file and the zip file unzipped with no funny business.

I always like playing with real examples, and there are plenty of those (these are just a few that caught me eye — there is much more and all these are backed up by detailed documentation):

Aside from the UI Library, there’s the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and an article on Yahoo’s Graded Browser Support by Nate Koechley.

All I can say is: have fun.

Amr, blogging star

1 Feb

Amr Awadallah is Yahoo’s new blogging star — he really hit the mark with his Google earnings predictions (which got picked up on CNN/Money and other places, I’m sure. See his “i told you so” post from yesterday).

There is some serious blogging mojo in my vicinity at work these days — Jeremy is my cubemate and Amr is about ten feet away. Anyway, nice call, Amr.

Yahoo! in Fortune’s “100 Best Companies To Work For”

12 Jan

“Best of” lists aren’t the be-all and end-all measurement of transcendent goodness, but I think it’s a positive thing to be included in such lists. Yahoo! made its debut in this year’s Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, which is cool since I just started here five months ago. IDG, my last company (parent company of InfoWorld) was listed for four years straight and it was indeed a really nice place to work. I’m sure there are many great companies that should be on such a list, so it’s not perfect, but I think Yahoo! deserves the ranking.

That being said, I’m not sure Fortune nailed the “why” very well, at least not for me. Here’s what they said:

The dot-com spirit lives at the Internet portal, which makes its debut on our list. Onsite amenities include massage, haircuts, dentistry, car wash, oil change, foosball, bocce, free lattes, and stock options for all.

Yes, we have all of that stuff, but for me it’s more about the people and what we’re working on than the “amenities.” I’ve only played foosball once since I’ve been there, and I played mainly because Matt and I decided that we had to play at least once just because we could (and he destroyed me. . . I haven’t played since). It’s kind of like when I went off to college. . . on first glance, I noticed some really cool facilities and services, but in the end it was really all about the people and the learning (ok, and a little mindless partying).

We’re always looking for good talent, so check out our jobs database if you want to join us. If you find a match, feel free to drop me a line with your resume (it’s chadd, then add yahoo-inc.com). I’ll do what I can to get your resume to the right person if it looks like a good fit!

Corporate blogging panel at Syndicate

14 Dec

(Update: links added as the wi-fi improved)

I’m sitting in on the corporate blogging panel at Syndicate moderated by Charlene Li from Forrester, featuring Jeremy Zawodny (fellow Yahoo! and my cubemate), David Geller (WhatCounts), Greg Renaicker (Newsgator), and Jodi Baumann (Network Appliance — where Dave Hitz has a blog). A few random thoughts on the panel (if you’re looking for a blow-by-blow summary of the panel, this is not it):

Early in the panel, someone in the audience asked Jeremy what a “blogroll” was when he used the term. I’m pointing that out not because it’s a bad question, but precisely because it’s a reasonable question for someone who wants to learn about blogging. Luckily, there’s a decent blogging glossary that I just found (though I’m not sure I’ve ever heard terms like “blogroach” before and many of the words are superfluous to someone who wants to understand the basics).

Earlier in the panel, Jodi Baumann said, “we’re a public company” a lot in describing their relatively conservative approach to their corporate blog — of course, so is Yahoo! (granted, we are a consumer-facing company, not a hardware company) I work at Yahoo! (so I’m biased), but I think the way Yahoo! handles “corporate blogging” is a model for any public company — and it hasn’t gotten us in trouble yet that I know of (same goes for Microsoft and Sun, of course). We have a handful of official Yahoo! blogs (Y! Search blog, Y! Developer Network blog), but the corporate blogging policy (PDF) for individuals with their own blogs (which I think is reasonable and necessary for a large public company) allows and encourages blogging within well-conceived guidelines that address appropriate legal issues. Official corporate blogs aside, as the talent wars heat up again in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, I think encouraging employees to express themselves in their personal blogs is a competitive advantage in hiring. In that sense, I think companies thinking about “corporate blogging” should have the courage to extend their policies to address employee blogs explicitly. Yahoo’s blogging policy was a big factor in why I joined the company (and since I joined, my blog has helped me meet people within Yahoo! which has helped me get up-to-speed faster).

There’s also a “just do it” quality to blogs (again, within reason). Charlene Li noted in closing the panel that the first GM blog went from conception to launch in eight days. If GM can do it in eight days (with all the legal issues of a giant public company), it shouldn’t take much longer than that for any company to do it.

Hack Day at Yahoo!

10 Dec

Yesterday (with the help and support of all kinds of people across Yahoo!), I organized and ran the first “Hack Day” for the Search and Marketplace group (Jeremy does a good job of capturing the day). A few weeks ago, I put together an all-volunteer advisory team to decide how we should structure the day. The advisory team included engineers, of course, but we also had solid representation from the UED (user experience design) and product management sides. The advisory team did everything from make Costco runs with me to get “portable geek snacks” to making trips to a local trophy shop to help choose prizes. (In one trip, I was briefly lost with a product manager from Yahoo! Maps — we had a good chuckle over that one.) The help of the advisory team and many others made Hack Day a true grassroots effort.

A Hack Day team contemplatesThroughout the planning, we had a lot of discussion about what the “rules” should be, and we essentially settled on what amounted to no rules. I made sure there was plenty of food and drink throughout the day, but the teams ultimately self-organized and procured their own resources to make things happen during the day. Hacking is about code, without a doubt, but I was equally interested in the organizational hacking that took place throughout the day — teams commandeered conference rooms and turned spaces around the company into hacking war rooms. We kept food and drink in a central place and many people worked there. At the end of the day, anyone with something to show did a 2-minute demo in front of their fellow hackers.

Everyone rose to the occasion. I was absolutely blown away by the sheer number and quality of the hacks that emerged at the end of the day and the teams did a great job with the two-minute limit. The crowd at the end of the day was enthusiastic and boisterous. As hack demos were shown, yells of approval filled the standing-room-only room. The range of hacks was truly mind-boggling — I’m still getting my head around everything that people put together yesterday. One of my weekend tasks (and a really fun one) is running through the hacks again to take a deeper look. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it’s a privilege and honor to experience and catalog such an incredible burst of hacker creativity. Yahoo! hackers — you ROCK!

Yahoo! acquires del.icio.us!

9 Dec

Yes, it’s true as of a few minutes ago — del.icio.us just joined us at Yahoo! See Yahoo! Search blog and the deli.icio.us blog for the scoop.

Welcome Joshua and team!

John Battelle, the Yahoo! TechDev Speaker Series, and the "Flickrization" of Yahoo!

3 Dec

John Battelle visited Yahoo! yesterday and wrote about it on his blog (see perspectives on the talk from Jeremy, Matt, and Nate. I took the blurry photo you see on your right). I invited John to speak for somewhat obvious reasons (he just wrote a book about search) but it was more than that. As the old saying goes,”journalism is the first draft of history.” If you look at John’s track record with Wired, the Industry Standard, the Web 2.0 conference, his Searchblog and now his book, John is the rare journalist who often seems to be writing the first draft of the future. That’s impressive.




John Battelle @ Yahoo!

Originally uploaded by jchaddickerson.

As Nate notes in his blog, these talks are a regular weekly feature at Yahoo! known as the “TechDev Speaker Series” — “TechDev” because it’s run by the Technology Development Group within the Search division at Yahoo! (that’s my group). Bradley Horowitz (our leader extraordinaire) started it last summer and handed it over to me a couple of weeks after I started at Yahoo! in August. His only instructions were: “Find interesting people for the series. Surprise me.” Bradley had already set the bar high by bringing in people like Chris Anderson, Mark Pauline, and Philip Rosedale (among others).

Since I took over the series, other than John Battelle we’ve had (in no particular order):

An impressive list without a doubt (and thanks to the folks within Yahoo! who’ve helped me bring some of them in). The subject matter of the series is intentionally broad and multi-disciplinary in nature. Chris Anderson spoke about the Long Tail, while Mark Pauline told us about hacking together fire-breathing robots for his performance art pieces with Survival Research Labs. Lawrence Lessig talked about how broken U.S. copyright law is in the digital domain and was followed the next week by Mark Hosler of the experimental and sound collage “band” Negativland, who gave us the artist’s perspective on the issue.

I think the multi-disciplinary content and focus of the speaker series as it continues to develop hints at something I’ve been noticing about Yahoo! in my first four months there. While Yahoo! continues to attract top talent with stellar computer science backgrounds, there’s another type of person Yahoo! seems to be attracting as well in what some have called the “Flickrization” of Yahoo!: folks who skipped the CompSci degree but built amazingly cool things on the web (I think the two complementary sides of Yahoo! are evident in the backgrounds of two Yahoo! employees recently named as top technology innovators under age 35 by the MIT Technology Review, for example). To me, working at Yahoo! these days is a heady mix of art and science (just like the web itself), and I’m glad to be a part of it. It rocks.

We're hiring: join one of the most innovative teams at Yahoo!

15 Nov

If you thought the Event Browser was kick-ass like I did, here’s your chance to actually work with the team that built it. Ravi Dronamraju is adding to Team Edison (a team he put together) and just sent this job description over:

Do you have what it takes to build, prototype, innovate? Are you the über-geek who can think in multiple programming languages? Do you write more lines of code than email? Well, come join Team Edison at Yahoo! As part of the Search and Marketplace organization you will get a chance to put your brain through daily exercise of creativity and innovation, laying the foundation for Web 2.0 and beyond.

Ideally you thrive in a team-first environment, enjoy problem-solving and learning new technologies. You should have MSCS or equivalent with 5+ years of experience in building Web applications. At the core, you can express yourself competently in any of the following: Perl, PHP, C/C++, JavaScript and CSS. Solid understanding of technologies like HTTP, Apache, RDBMS/MySQL, Unix is a plus.

I work very closely with this team, so if you’re interested in this role, send me an e-mail with your resume (and tell me what you like to do and why you want to join the team). Please put “Team Edison position” in the subject line. My Yahoo! e-mail is chadd -AT- yahoo-inc -DOT- com. (No recruiters or agencies, please.)

Job descriptions rarely do justice to a position, so here’s my informal scoop. . . this team is heavily-focused on API development, both internal and external, so the work itself really couldn’t be more fun. The team is also small and nimble (very much on purpose) — a great group to join if you want to have an immediate impact (just ask Ed, who started working on the Event Browser on his second day, I think). And Yahoo! really is a great place to work — I’ve been here barely over three months now and it’s a blast. Come join the fun.

Bono, Mark Hosler, and lost opportunities

10 Nov

Mark salutes Yahoo! So, Bono from U2 was here at Yahoo! yesterday (here’s the Flickr photo). As I’ve mentioned here before, we had Mark Hosler of Negativland pay us a visit barely a month ago. For the uninitiated, Mark and Negativland were sued by U2 for copyright infringement (see the Negativland entry in Wikipedia for details) in one of the landmark copyright suits in the history of pop music (I’d put it up right there with George Harrison being sued for copyright infringement for appropriating the melody of the Chiffon’s “He’s So Fine” for his song “My Sweet Lord”). They lost the suit.

If you were to super-impose the Bono photo on the Mark Hosler photo in this blog post (they were both in the exact same lobby — building D on the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus), Mark would be mock-saluting Bono from behind. I wonder if it would have been a slightly different “salute.” Now that would have made a good photo.

Openness, advertising, and the Yahoo! Maps API

4 Nov

Amidst all this talk about disruption, maps, and advertising. here’s something I was super-glad to see: a bold clarification about terms of use for maps developers over at the YDN blog from Vince Maniago (yeah, we launched Maps yesterday but no one is sitting still!)

Our position has always been to allow usage of the Yahoo! Maps APIs free of charge for non-commercial use, as well as commercial use granted on a case-by-case basis. This is defined in our FAQ which also has instructions for how to contact us should you want to seek permission for commercial use.

In general, if you are displaying mashups featuring Yahoo! Maps on your site or application and you make your stuff available for free to users, you’re welcome to use the Yahoo! Maps APIs. This is true even if your site is supported by ads — even ads from other vendors.

Without a doubt, we still want you to sign up for for Yahoo! Publisher Network to display our ads on your site (for which you will receive a cut, of course), but we’re not going to ask you to use YPN unless your own stuff isn’t free.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.