We’re doing another Hack Day at Yahoo! tomorrow — can’t wait. I have no idea what’s going to happen. And that’s the best part (and absolutely intentional). We leave lots of room for emergence.
See Jeremy and my post for info on the last one, plus some Flickr photos. Expect more after tomorrow.
Bonus reading:
I’ve been working on a project recently that is really the convergence of everything I love about my work these days: promoting grassroots innovation at Yahoo! 
through events like Hack Day, building cool stuff, and trying to glimpse the future through prototypes that reach a little bit. (Aside: I just noticed that in Jeremy’s original post about Hack Day, he called it the first “annual.” We’re doing them quarterly, and in fact, we’re doing another one a few weeks from now. Can’t wait.) What I’m writing about today is actually the result of Ed Ho, Jonathan Trevor, Karon Weber, and Sam Tripodi’s “failed” Hack Day project. At the end of our first Hack Day, Ed, Jonathan, Karon, and Sam had nothing to show but ambition, but the experience lit a fire that resulted in something really cool that we can now share.
I’m referring to CheckMates , a prototype for telling your friends where you are and seeing where they are on a map (i.e. check your mates) — on your phone. It wasn’t even close to working at the end of our last Hack Day, but it is now. You can download it now — just click on the Install link on this page and follow the instructions. One note: since this is a limited-release prototype, we’re capping registrations, so the downloads will pause at some point. There are a couple other disclaimers.) This prototype was built all on public Yahoo! APIs, so we’re also hoping that it will inspire you to build your own stuff! Theoretically, Checkmates should work on any Java/MIDP2 capable phone but it’s known to work on Nokia Series 60 phones like the 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610 models, and it is likely to work on 3230, 6630, 6260 as well.
Mapping on a phone certainly isn’t anything new, but when you overlay a social network on top of the mobile mapping experience (in this case, your Flickr “friends and family”), it gets really interesting. When using the Checkmates prototype, you’re able to see your friends’ locations, what their status is, and when they last broadcasted their location (assuming they are also using the app).
Aside from pulling your social network into the mobile mapping experience, Checkmates takes things a bit farther — it takes you inside the building and lets you track your friends when you get there. Think of it as an additional zoom level, jumping beyond street level into a building or other space.
For this prototype, we put a map of the eTech floor into the app, but the mechanism we used (the Flickr API) to do that means that the possiblity exists to spontaneously map a world of semi-public and private spaces that have been unexplored up to this point. Imagine going to an amusement park, taking a photo of the map at the front of the park, then using that map immediately within an intuitive and easy-to-use mobile mapping application to track your friends and family while you’re there. Not to mention that you could share this map with other people who might need it after you. Cool, huh?
This prototype is so fresh that the URL for it is ugly (sorry about that — here’s a tinyurl instead: http://tinyurl.com/pya4x), but we wanted to get it into your hands to play with it despite a few rough edges here and there.
There’s a lot going on within Checkmates, so check out the page that explains how to use it and the FAQ.
If you want to let the team know what you think, email us at techdev-feedback (at) yahoo-inc.com. Remember, this is just a prototype and as such, has no support — but we still want to hear how you’re using and how you would make it better. We hope you have fun with it!
Update: Ed writes more about the inspiration for this, and Jonathan adds his thoughts.
Technorati tags: etech, etech06, yahoo
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If you want to know more about one of the key people driving some of the coolest stuff happening at Yahoo, subscribe to Bradley Horowitz’s blog now. (Bradley happens to be my boss).
I first met Bradley in person when he was on a panel I was moderating at the Syndicate conference last May. A week or so before that, I got an e-mail from Caterina saying something like, “Bradley used to be in a punk rock band in Detroit and he cleared the way for bringing Flickr to Yahoo! You guys should meet.” Thank you, Syndicate, and thank you, Caterina. You did me right.
Be sure to scan Bradley’s bio for an entertaining read and check out Bradley’s first post, “Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers.”
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 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.
“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!
(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.
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.
Throughout 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!
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 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.
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.
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