and the prize for most misleading headline of the day goes to...

... 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.

random pointers of the day

Define "Irony": Fire supressor not available... after a fire at the company that makes them wipes it all out.

In the meantime, Dolphins keep showing more traits associated with intelligence, including recognition of "self", ability to understand sign language, and extrapolation of learned behavior to produce even better results. Next up: Dolphin 2.0, in which dolphins pick stocks and do better than both chimps choosing stuff at random and the S&P 500. More details at 7.

Meantime, in Hawaii, astronomers have observed a galaxy as it was 12.88 billion years ago. The article calls this "cosmic archeology" which doesn't really sound like an actual discipline, at least until the arrival of warp drives or some such.

Yes, nothing earth-shattering. But hey, it's Saturday. :)

now *this* is what "2.0" looks like :)

As usual, I emerge from my blog hibernation to comment on a cool release we're doing. :) Who knows, someday I may even get my mojo back and keep at it.

Today, it is our launch last night of three new social websites: Photos, Videos and Group. Now we did have versions of those apps before, but nothing like what's there now. The Videos app, in particular, uses our new video transcoding APIs (which allow you to request transcoding into .FLV format of any video uploaded into Ning) as well as supporting embedding from other services. As usual, the point of a site on Ning is to clone it and make it your own, and we've done a lot of work to make it easier to do just that. There's more to do of course, and the next few months will be packed with updates to these apps. Plus, cool embeddables! :)

The apps have been showing up in the blogsphere, starting with GigaOm Tuesday Night, then linked by Battelle, both of which had pretty nice things to say. :) For a more internal perspective, check out David's and Kyle's posts, and that from the Ning blog.