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.

- Sr. Engineer, Exceptional Performance
- Product Manager, Developer Network

If you or someone you know is interested (and qualified), send me a resume (dan at yahoo-inc . com). Both jobs are on-site in Sunnyvale, California. Also, I think I’m suppose to include this lawyer stuff: In the interest of full disclosure, I get a referral bonus and you get a great job at a great company! Yahoo! Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. For more information or to search all of our openings, please visit http://careers.yahoo.com.

Technical Yahoo, Sr, Yahoo! Exceptional Performance

Come join the Exceptional Performance team! We are responsible for measuring and improving the performance of all Yahoo! products worldwide. We’re looking for someone who doesn’t accept the status quo and instead is driven to make our products the best they can be for our users. You will be responsible for:
- Gathering and evangelizing performance best practices across the company.
- Working as a performance consultant across all product teams within Yahoo!.
- Designing experiments for measuring performance and analyzing the results.
- Helping build tools to quantify product performance.

Basic Qualifications:
- BS in Computer Science or related field
- 3+ years experience with web applications
Preferred Qualifications:
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills for working with engineering teams and product management
- Proficiency in at least three of these areas: Perl, PHP, JavaScript, CGI, MySQL, HTTP, Windows SDK
- Attention to detail

If you love to push systems to their optimum we’re waiting to hear from you.

Product Manager, Yahoo! Developer Network

The Yahoo! Developer Network ( http://developer.yahoo.com/) is continuing to open up Yahoo! products and services across all of Yahoo’s services to provide an easy-to-use yet powerful platform for third-party developers to build new and innovative products and businesses. Inspired ideas and innovations are bubbling up from third parties every day, and your job is to help the Yahoo! Developer Network team enable this creativity, and make it flourish.

The perfect candidate is a highly-collaborative and strategic thinker who is extremely analytical, detail oriented, and not afraid to deal with tactical issues to achieve strategic goals as we build the next-generation web. Good prioritization skills, excellent written and oral communication skills, quantitative smarts, and a high degree of comfort managing multiple projects, leading teams, and working with senior executives are required. You should enjoy working in a fast-paced environment with dynamic responsibilities and should have very strong communication, presentation and relationship-building skills.

Some responsibilities include:
- Developing requirements, prioritizing enhancements, translating into MRDs/PRDs and driving projects to completion.
- Defining, tracking and improving key product metrics and developing tests against those metrics
- Conducting competitive analysis and identifying areas for differentiation.
- Aggressively identifying opportunities for improvement, and incorporating new product offerings into the Yahoo! Developer Network platform on an ongoing basis.
- Helping refine existing processes to support routing, tracking, and fulfillment requests from third-party developers and partners
- Developing and maintaining a working knowledge of systems throughout Yahoo! to inform resolution of requests from third-party developers and partners
- Working with cross-functional teams and identifying and working with the appropriate technical and business owners to facilitate decision-making and cross-functional communication