Now blogging at diego's weblog. See you over there!

... News.com, with their article "Yahoo to give away email code", from the article:

The move to open up the underlying code of Yahoo Mail--used by 257 million people--is designed to spark development of thousands of new e-mail applications built not only by Yahoo engineers but by outside companies and individuals.

Hmm... now, let's see what Jeremy has to say about this:

Our Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth) is a generic mechanism that will allow users to grant 3rd party web-based applications access their Yahoo! data. There's already a similar mechanism in place on Flickr and used by services like MOO. BBAuth is the protocol that's going to open the door to doing the same thing for many Yahoo! branded services in the coming months. Stay tuned for those announcements. :-)

The first two Yahoo! services supporting BBAuth are Yahoo! Photos (API) and Yahoo! Mail (API only available to Hack Day attendees at the moment).

Okay. So, Yahoo is opening up its authentication API, and probably other APIs to be able, to, well, do something useful with the Yahoo auth API aside from signing on. This isn't peanuts, it's definitely interesting, but ... "giving away email code"? Please. Someone needs to talk to the News.com guys and explain the difference between "giving away code" and "exposing an API", pronto.

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on September 30 2006 at 12:31 PM