Now that the cat's out of the bag on at least one internal mailing list, I figured I'd mention it here as well.
About a year and a half ago I was part of a small team that launched our developer network. At the time it was search-centric and called the Yahoo! Search Developer Network or YSDN for short.
It didn't take long for the rest of the company to jump on board and for YSDN to become simply YDN: Yahoo! Developer Network. A dedicated team was formed to run YDN and I passed on the opportunity to be part of it (there was still more work to be done in the Search world). I did, however, pitch in when I could.
About a week ago I was presented with the opportunity to get back involved in the developer network and that's exactly what I'm doing.
There's a lot more work ahead of us and a lot of cool stuff to get out the door. Look over the roughly 20 properties and services that are currently part of the Yahoo! Developer Network, I'm reminded of how much can happen in a mere 18 months.
[One other person moved as well, but I'll let him announce that if he chooses to do so.]
Posted by jzawodn at June 21, 2006 06:51 PM
What an excellent move. YDN is great project to work on :) And you are the perfect guy to work on it. May I submit a feature request? Commercial use rules for the APIs would be greatly appreciated!
Congrats. The Yahoo Developer Network seems to be doing some great work and releasing some very good APIs. What I would give to be a part of that. The innovation, the PHP-supported goodness. I guess I'll have to resign myself to using the APIs for now.
Excellent. Looking forward to *even more* good stuff!
Congrats. Looking forward to some cool new stuff out of you guys.
I love all the great things Yahoo! has done with its Developer Network. I've written a number of IRC bot plugins that use Yahoo! Local to find Zip codes, Yahoo! search to define words and so on...
I *wish* that the Yahoo! Search API supported Yahoo! Shortcuts -- it would open up a huge amount of functionality that would be really easy to use. Just think about it: a REST-based unit converter, dictionary, flight tracker and so on. I've request this feature numerous times on the Developer message boards.
Is there a better way to make my voice heard? Thanks!
MrChucho:
Good point. There are some very useful shortcuts we could expose.
hey, congrats JZ!
and congrats to all those YDN developers too... they're in great hands with you (just be careful with those gliders now -- you have kids to look after ;)
- dmc
i've gone back and forth on ydn, but ultimately i see it (and projects like it) as beneficial for the tooling of the web. we are long overdue in this field to provide the tools, patterns and reuse that have been available to traditional software developers for some time. while tooling brings commoditization, this is inevitable anyway, and i would argue that the financials of the web business are already in the commodity phase, so the tools need to get there if these businesses are going to support their margins.
Congratulations! It must have been the new Messenger SDK that lured you over :)
The Yahoo Developer Network has the best support for PHP I've ever seen. I love the &output=php option for returning serialized PHP. Other companies ought to follow your lead.
Congratulations!
One licensing issue to watch: making sure a company can build a business around the APIs without suddenly being killed by a non-compete if Yahoo sees the success and seeks to enter the market. Tough political challenge internally, I suspect...
Jeremy ---
This kicks ass - congratulations to both you and to YDN.
Question - What happens to the Yahoo Developer Network when you guys are acquired by MSFT?
I assume that new projects would be developed using their various technologies?
Good luck man!
Congrats Jeremy!
its nice that yahoo officially released Messenger SDK.
