Every year during the second week of July our family has a reunion in Michigan, USA. I’ll be gone for three days but I’ll have the laptop and wireless. While it’s unlikely there will be a blog post during that time it’s possible! (who can stay away from blogging when it’s so addictive, huh? Didn’t think so!).
In the mean time I’ve been given (along with the rest of the programmers around the world) a new nugget to chew on and that is Yahoo! BOSS. In a nutshell, their new API will allow you to retrieve their search results and practically let you do anything you want with them. Re-order them, put ads next to them and generate revenue, mix them with your own results, you name it. It’s really intriguing and it’s definitely ballsy.
I’ve been thinking about Yahoo!’s potential return on this investment… Why would they give away the one thing that’s made them who they are? Well first, by taking the lead they are doing a few things such as increasing their standing with developers around the world as a partner to have and to stick with, they might also be looking for Google to follow suit or come up with a comparable system (gotta love competition), and finally they might also be looking for startups and unique talent to pluck from when all us developers start really using this thing in unique and interesting ways.
Just think: Yahoo! has basically said “Here’s our search results. Show us what you think you can do with them.”
Pretty cool!!