Demo Y!OS/YAP Application – "Chatty Kathy"

I gave a talk at work today to the Hack Lunch crew on Y!OS, YAP and the Y!OS PHP SDK. Part of the talk entailed building a sample YAP application using the PHP SDK so I could show people how it’s done.

The application I built, which I call “Chatty Kathy“, grabs all of the Yahoo! Updates generated by your connections and distills it down to a list of your connections (sorted by who generates the most updates) and their applications (sorted by the ones they use most often). It’s not super interesting (although it helped me to find some new applications) and it’s not super complicated (I wrote it in about two hours last night), but it does provide a decent demonstration of how to build an application making use of Yahoo!’s social platform.

For anyone interested, I’ve made the source code available.

Using Ruby to talk to Yahoo! Mail

I’m doing a little work in Ruby this weekend and happened to write a small class for talking to the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. It only deals with the Yahoo! Mail bits, it doesn’t handle Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth). However, I thought I’d share it with everyone to show you how rediculously easy it can be.

To start, you’ll need the net/http (included in Ruby’s core) and json (oddly absent from the core, but available nontheless) modules. The client itself is a mere 18 lines long, although I’ll admit there’s very little error checking being done in this barebones version.

require "net/http"
require "json"

class YMail
    def initialize(appid, cookie, wssid)
        @appid = appid
        @cookie = cookie
        @wssid = wssid
    end

    def method_missing(method, argument)
        body = JSON.generate({"method" => method.id2name, "params" => [argument]})
        url = "/ws/mail/v1/jsonrpc?appid=#{@appid}&wssid=#{@wssid}"
        http = Net::HTTP.new("mail.yahooapis.com")
        res = http.post(url, body, {"Content-Type" => "application/json", "Cookie" => @cookie})
        JSON.parse(res.body)["result"]
    end
end

Using the YMail class is simple enough.

ymail = YMail.new(applicationID, bbauthCookie, bbauthWssid)
puts "Number of Folders = #{ymail.ListFolders({})['numberOfFolders']}"

You’ll have to pass your application ID as well as the BBAuth cookie and WSSID returned during the authentication process to the YMail constructor. However, once you’ve done so you can easily call any method available in the Yahoo! Mail Web Service and get back a Ruby hash to interrogate.

Open Hack Day – the hackumentary

During my time at Yahoo! I have been fortunate enough to meet and become friends with Ricky Montalvo (aka “kick ass movie guy” at Yahoo!). I first met Ricky at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago where Ricky filmed my AIR Mail presentation.

At the recent Yahoo! Open Hack Day in Sunnyvale, Ricky worked with a crew of three filming his hackumentary. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the film and I was delighted to see myself (pimple and all) a few times in the trailer (at 1:02 and again at 1:41). I can’t wait to see the whole thing, but in the meantime have a look at the trailer.

Open Hack Day 2008 Wrapup

In the past, I’ve given two long accounts of the Open Hack Day’s (2006, 2007). This time I’m going to keep it pretty short.

My Talks

I gave two talks. The first one went well, no drops in internet access (paying Ash‘s assistant $50 to keep him busy during my talk really paid off). I lost internet access during my second talk, but was saved by Allen Tom and his EVDO-powered laptop. The talks seemed to be well received and generated a lot of questions.

My Job

I won’t mince words, I have hated my job for the past twelve months. Those who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been a miserable person for quite some time now, frequently venting my frustrations loudly. I’ve simultaneously considered quitting the company, transferring internally and extended leave as solutions to my unhappiness.

It’s difficult to reconcile this attitude towards my job against my attitude leading up to the two previous hack days where I was proud of what I was working on and wanted to share it with the world. So much has changed since London, personally and professionally. It’s hard to accept so much change in such a short period of time, especially when it’s had such a huge impact on my mood.

Photo by riverspring

I did, however, turn a bit of a corner in the past week. As hack day approached I actually found myself happy to be at work. I was enjoying what I was doing and I was looking forward to the next day. I was working twice as hard and getting four times the enjoyment and the only thing that had changed was that I was working towards hack day.

Which brings me to…

Mo Kakwan

Photo by Jinho.Jung

I will never forget the night I spent with Mo Kakwan at hack day. No, get your minds out of the gutter. It wasn’t like that. It was better. Mo is a hack day legend. Friday night, after the Girl Talk concert, Mo popped into the room where I was stationed for the evening. He was curious to know what was going on and what I did. We chatted for a little while and he explained what he was hacking this year.

After a while, he asked if he could hang out in the room with several of us from Y!OS. Without blinking I told him, “of course”. For the next 17 hours (give or take) I was witness to the magic. Mo used me, mostly, as a sounding board for ideas in the early hours. In the later hours I helped him debug some issues in his hack. Throughout, I could see Mo go through all the hack day stages.

Mo started out passionate about the idea and quickly got to work. He was hammering out code, making things work. Before too long, he’d run into problems. After some quick thinking, he routed around the issues, determined to make the hack work. Hours later, as fatigue was kicking in, more problems. With the lack of sleep looming, you could see Mo getting frustrated as each problem mounted. He discovered he had a lot of work left to do and time was not on his side.

I crashed for two hours on the floor from 6:30-8:30am. When I awoke, he looked bad. The early morning had taken it’s toll on him. He’d hit the wall. He looked unsure of himself, disappointed that he might let everyone down by not outdoing his performance at the 2006 hack day.

Determined not to let that happen, I jumped in to lend what help I could. I pumped him up when he seemed down, helped to diagnose the snags he ran into and ran to get him help when I didn’t have an answer (thanks, Zach!). At around 2:00, only an hour before the presentations would start, he hit pay dirt. His virtual mosh pit sprung to life as physics engine-driven moshers hopped and bumped on stage with our recently digitized voices playing in the background. The joy on his face was incredible as we shared the (for me, anyway) most painful high-five, ever.

The joy of the hack is an amazing thing. That moment where your brain clicks in and says, “holy shit, after all that I can’t fucking believe it works!” It’s like the top of Everest to a climber. You get there cold, tired, beaten, exhausted and near death…but you will never trade that moment for anything else in your life. I relived that moment through Mo on Saturday…and realized how much I’ve missed it.

For the last twelve months I haven’t had my Everest. I’ve just been walking around the mountain…cold, hungry and near death. I need hack day. Not just one of them, I need lots of them. In fact, I need every day to be hack day. My happiness and my sanity depend on it.

So, how do I find a way to make every day hack day? I guess that’s my next hack.

Yahoo! Address Book Web Service released (finally)

When we first released the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, many people asked me if they could get access to the Yahoo! Address Book through it. I’m happy to say that today you can finally access the Yahoo! Address Book via web service.

This has been a really long time coming and I think it’s great that the Yahoo! Mail Web Service finally has the complimentary service it’s been crying out for. Also, it’ll be nice when certain, nameless social networking applications stop asking me for my username and password to import my Yahoo! Address Book.

Activator: Pimp my buddy list

Neal’s Web 2.0 video is up on YDN now. This is his YOS talk and includes a sneak peek of my new project, Activator, at about 30:20 into the video.

True to it’s name, Activator is here to activate your social graph. It’s meant to help out with “cold starting” social networks. Many times when you first arrive at a social network, you have no friends and no clear means of how to find your existing friends. Activator’s charter is to find those people for you and surface them so you can quickly and easily add them. I’m still trying to figure out what’s the best way to write openly about Activator without getting myself into trouble. For now, check out Neal’s video and you’ll see a quick screenshot of what Activator may look like when released.

My new Yahoo! project

Well, I guess now that Ari and Neal have totally totally let the cat out of the bag about YOS, I finally get to talk a little more openly about my new project: Activator. There’s a short paragraph in that article that mentions Activator:

The activator engine handles the combining of different relationship groupings, such as the Yahoo Mail e-mail address book, Yahoo Messenger contacts, Flickr friends, Yahoo 360, and Yahoo Mash, Sample said. Yahoo will be careful to protect user privacy and won’t apply the information without user consent, he added.

That’s not a great description of Activator, kind of leaves you wondering what the hell it actually does. As soon as I figure out how much I can talk about it I’ll post more. In any case, when you hear them talk about Activator you can think of me.

I think we're gonna need a bigger boat

Have you ever watched one of those nature shows about sharks (yes, Jaws counts) where they throw chum overboard to attract the sharks before they throw in the divers? Lately it seems like Yahoo! is the boat, the media is doing the chum’ing and other Bay Area companies are the sharks (we already know who plays the role of the divers).

I’ve been getting a lot more recruiting requests lately, including one that explicitly called out “changes at Yahoo!” as a reason for getting in touch with me. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the attention and all. It’s good to know that if I were to accidentally fall off the Yahoo! boat that plenty of sharks would be in the water, ready to…eat me.

On the other hand, it would be nice if the sharks didn’t jump in the boat trying to eat me before Yahoo! casts me over.

Low Fat Mail…rad!

The Scottland University Hack Day sounded pretty cool…wish I could have gone. (Ahem…organizers…what has two thumbs and would gladly come to hack days in the UK? This guy. Just pick up the tab on my air fare)

Anyway, one of the hacks is called “Low Fat Mail”. It was built by some chap named Alex Mason. Alex…if you happen upon this post, I’d like to see it. I love seeing all the stuff built using the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. I admit, it’s a dense API. But if you can get through the initial shock of it, you can do some fun stuff with it.

BoxBe's blowing up

Wired wrote about BoxBe today. For those who don’t remember, I wrote about BoxBe a little while ago. BoxBe did their Yahoo! Mail integration using the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, which I was (until recently) the tech lead for.

BoxBe has been getting a lot of press lately, including a recent post on GigaOm. BoxBe is definitely the biggest application built on top of the Mail web service to date, so it’s exciting to see it get so much press. Way to go, guys!