Yahoo! Hack! Day! results! (and bad album art)

Oy-yez! It's IT Blogwatch, in which Yahoo! holds a Hack Day. Not to mention the museum of bad album covers...

"Hack day"? Reuters' Eric Auchard explains:

...a 24-hour "Yahoo Hack Day," where it has invited more than 500 most youthful outside programmers to build new applications using Yahoo services. Hack is used in its original sense of "creative programming" not illicit sense of breaking into computers.

"Hack Day" mixes Web programming competitions, overnight slumber party and a music festival where pop music superstar Beck has been hired to play a concert on the Yahoo campus.

Om Malik and the delightfully named Nitin Borwankar see a renaissance for Yahoo:

Yahoo’s Hack Day might have looked a job fair from afar, but the announcements at the show indicate that the company is looking to go outside its campus, and jumpstart its innovation engine. The hack day comes at a time, when dark clouds are gathering over the Sunnyvale, California-based Company that is always playing catch up with Google.

The long delayed upgrades to their core search/advertising platforms, and other issues are just some of the problems being faced by the company ... There is the nagging issue of talent flying the coop. When juxtaposed against this backdrop, Yahoo Hack Day must have some kind of strategic importance.
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One of the big announcements was BBAuth, or browser based authentication, that will allow developers to build third party apps that access Yahoo data. This is a single sign-on product, though unlike Microsoft Passport, it can work with other sign-on solutions.
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Using this BBAuth, Yahoo can help create an ecosystem of third party apps. In addition, there is that 200 million Yahoo user base that can log into these applications. It could be a real developer magnet ... Flickr also released new APIs for Flickr and Upcoming alongside a Yahoo Mail API. The Mail API is significant in that it is the first of the web mail providers officially providing programmatic access to Mail.

These are good moves – Yahoo will get some more developers paying attention to the company, though I have not had a chance to think about how much of a business impact these moves will have. Mash-ups, and APIs are cool but, in the end they have to be translate into cold hard cash for any publicly translated company.

Ionut Alex. Chitu noticed the Mail API too:

Yahoo announced at Yahoo Hack Day that they'll open Yahoo Mail, so programmers can develop extensions and new interfaces for Yahoo Mail. The new API, that will be available later this year, will use Yahoo's browser-based authentication.
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Yahoo Mail has more than 257 million users, some of them being spam bots. Yahoo doesn't include POP3 access for their free mail service, so this API might allow developers to deliver this feature (there are applications that create POP3 servers for Yahoo Mail, but the API will make things easier). It will be interesting to see if Google follows the trend and provides an official API for Gmail.

Michael Arrington has a picture of the winning team:

After 24 hours of hacking (with a break for a private Beck concert in the Yahoo courtyard the first evening), 54 projects were demo’d to the crowd of about 400 people. Over 3,000 pictures from the event (tagged “HackDay06″) are on Flickr here.

A handful of teams were awarded prizes in categories ranging from “Too Useful” and “Best Schtick” to “Overall Winner”. The overall winner, determined by a quick huddle of judges after the demos ... was a hardware/software combination device stashed inside a woman’s handbag. The winning project, called Blogging In Motion, combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures. The device was created by Diana Eng, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy.
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The other 53 projects weren’t bad, either. And I had a wonderful time emcee’ing the event. Something special happened at Yahoo this week, and I was very lucky to be part of it.

Chipotle watches the "wrong" sort of TV:

I know my man card will be revoked for noticing this, but wasn't the woman on the left in the photograph on Project Runway? Evidently, she and her partners won first prize at Yahoo's Hack Day. I think they hacked a purse with a camera that posts photos to a blog every few steps.

VC David Hornik was there:

it was an incredible event. Inspired by past internal hack days, the folks at the Yahoo Developer Network decided to hold an event open to the public. For most of the day Friday, developers from around the world (literally) were given a tour of Yahoo's various APIs (Maps, Flickr, Messenger, Upcoming, mail) by the technical folks behind the various services. They were then set loose on the APIs, powered by candy, pizza and beer.
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Perhaps most interesting to me was the fact that a number of companies sent teams of engineers to Yahoo Hack Day to mash up their own applications with Yahoo's services. There were a couple of teams from Plaxo who integrated the Plaxo database into applications like "friends" on Flickr and Messenger. The guys from Technorati built a Yahoo widget to display real time blog discussions. A couple engineers from Mozes, an SMS gateway, built SMS applications on top of the Yahoo web services. The SmugMug team, used Yahoo's UI services to build photo collages. And the engineers from Sharp, who sponsored the event, hacked together their own digital copier to scan documents/photos and automatically post them to Flickr using a the UI on the copier itself. There were also folks from Ruby Red Labs showing off their design chops.
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The fact that Yahoo embraced engineers from startups and design shops throughout the ecosystem is indicative of the sort of co-opetition that is going on around the web these days. Big organizations like Yahoo, Google and Amazon are making significant pieces of their infrastructure available to third parties for development of new applications. As a result, those big organizations are able to inject their DNA broadly into applications throughout the web. And, by and large, both parties are benefited by the relationship ... I think it is a really smart move for Yahoo and I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of it, not just from Yahoo, but from all of its major web competitors, in the months and years to come.

Dan Blank feels fine:

Why would a non-programmer care about this? ... Creating a community around your product that allows individuals to express themselves through it is incredibly powerful. Perhaps this doesn’t affect the bottom line right away, but just look at MySpace.
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As media gatekeepers from a previous generation test the waters online, their biggest reward may come by swinging those gates wide open. People will be more likely to be on your side and help build you up, than tear you down.

Buffer overflow:

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And finally... Museum of bad album covers: the worst album covers ever

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.