The official announcement can be found on the Developer Network Blog.

Let’s start this post with what BBAuth is and what it can be used for. It was designed to allow third-party applications to interact with user-specific data with the users’ consent. On top of doing the obvious, it supports Single Sign-On out of the box.

That means you can build applications that instead of creating your own sign-up flow, which requires users to pick yet another username and password, you can let them sign in with their existing Yahoo! account. The best thing about it is that it’s safe, the YahooId does not get shared with the applications. Your application needs to redirect the user to the Yahoo! BBAuth login and after the user successfully logs in, your app will receive an encrypted and unique userid for each user that logs in. This sample application makes use of SSO.

Good or bad? That is up-to-you do decide. My opinion is that this can make navigating the web so much easier for users, and I am one of them! I don’t want to have to remember ‘x’ usernames and ‘y ‘passwords and keep adding to the list everyday. There are also other ways of dealing with that problem, but here is a solution that is really straightforward. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think! I want to add that this is not driven by a huge initiative to get everyone on Yahoo!, but an attempt to put out another tool that developers can decide to adopt if they like it.

But that’s not all! Yahoo! Photos opened up an API that takes advantage of BBAuth as well. I wrote a sample application that is using it, which allows user to view and update titles and descriptions for photos stored on Yahoo!. The ajaxy parts are using the YUI libraries. On top of all that, we are doing a private beta for developers who attend our public Hackday! The new Yahoo! Mail is opening up their backend!! Appid sign-up will be limited for now but stay tuned for future updates.

For me, this has been quite a ride from the first time we talked about making BBAuth happen until today, the day we finally launched. In a big company like Yahoo!, you need to get input / approval from quite some folks if you want to do something out of the box and open up the company. All that makes sense and is justifiable but sometimes I wish it would have been faster. On the other side, I learned a lot about the company I work for, how big companies work in general, egos, friends and allies and most importantly how you get stuff done that is obviously not on everyone’s “need this today” list.

Like most platform projects that have to support a lot of different use-cases, the list of people that have made this happen is very long and I don’t even want to try to list them all. Instead I want to send a big “general” thank you out to all the thinkers and do-ers, the try-to-stop-it-ers and the must-have-today-ers! Thanks to all of you for making it what it is today!

Further reading: On the Developer Network page we have the official announcement. Jeremy posted something on his blog as well. Without his help to clear last minute “congestions” I am not sure if would have gone out today :)

Besides the entertainment and classes we will have networking, coding, camping, presentations, wifi, food (not free – sorry, we spent the $ somewhere else), parking and and and. It will be a lot of fun! If you didn’t sign up already, this is your last call! You can do this on Upcoming.org.

Sidenote: The timer on the hackday page gets powered by the RESTful getTime web service that I wrote for fun. How much more basic then getTime can a web service get? That’s not the point :) The nice thing about it is that it supports JSON and serialized PHP on top of the XML output.

create your own visited states map

Someone stole a cell phone that runs ShoZu, a mobile photo sharing service. The person who “found” the phone took pictures of the now famous (65.000 view at the time of writing the post) Chihuahua. Enjoy!

Zonetag is another solution that can upload pictures form a mobile device to Flickr and on top of that is able to geotag images based on the cell tower information.

More on Upcoming.org: “Yeah, we’ve been busy. What’s new? Undiscovered events, Flickr photos for events, buddy icons, new event pages, and more than we can remember.”

More on Flickr: “Flickr’s great for exploring photos by photographer, tag, time, text and group, and now it’s also great for exploring photos by place.” – APIs are in the make

I was looking up the Pyramids of Egypt yesterday when I realized that I could also see all the places I lived in Germany in great detail. When I was studying in Germany my daily commute led me by the Porsche and Mercedes factory. Here is the route I usually took:

This “tour” takes you past some of the most interesting POI around Stuttgart.
- the Ludwigsburg Palace (Wikipedia)
- Porsche Headquaters
- Gottlieb-Daimler Stadion where a couple of FIFA World Cup games will be played in July. Check out this mashup for more information
- Mercedes Benz Headquaters which stretches over a couple of miles along the Neckar river.
- And finally the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen

One more interesting spot is the TV tower in Stuttgart (Wikipedia)

There are already a couple of toolkits out that deal with those issues like DOJO, Zimbra and Sarissa just to name a few. Each one has different strength and feature sets. Today, Yahoo! announced that they put their home grown JavaScript libraries under the FreeBSD license which is available at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

The Toolkit contains JavaScript files that make it much easier to develop more sophisticated web UIs. Features that are included are

• Animation
• Element Positioning
• Drag and Drop
• Connections
• Event Handling

It comes with some so called UI Components e.g a calendar that enables users to move between months or select a specific date and more.

Update: This blog post covers the libraries with a lot of detail.