Open Hack NYC

The Developer Conference

Agenda

Friday Sessions

Track 1: Yahoo! Platform Opportunities

Open Yahoo!: Introducing an Audience Platform for the Web (video and slides)

Cody Simms

For years, Yahoo! has consistently maintained one of the largest aggregated audiences on the planet across any form of media. As Yahoo! opens up, we are building many mechanisms to allow you -- developers, publishers, and advertisers -- to access that audience with innovative experiences in ways that integrate directly with our own consumer products and help you use Yahoo! to tap into engaged users. Cody Simms, Sr Director of Product Management at Yahoo!, will introduce our vision for an open Yahoo! and will walk through tangible ways that Yahoo! is becoming an audience platform for the web.

Improving the User Experience for Ads on Your Site

Chris Jaffe

Advertisers and users are both essential to any publisher's success. Advertising User Experience is focused on optimizing your users' experience of the ads on your site, while balancing the need to make advertising effective for the marketers who want to advertise on your site. By looking at these two aspects together helps to keep a loyal and engaged audience, a valuable asset to attract advertisers--especially those that create high quality advertising that is valuable and appreciated by your users. Chris will share best practices from leading Yahoo!'s Advertising User Experience (AdUX) team, focused on balancing the goals of advertisers and the needs of users.

The Rise of Social Referrals (slides)

Mike Tadlock

Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Buzz, and other social platforms have created a significant new source of traffic for web applications. For many sites, these social referrals will outpace search engine leads by the end of 2009. This rise in quantity is accompanied by evidence that social referrals may be significantly more valuable than a leads generated from search. To properly capitalize on this opportunity, developers must deliver on a four stage social referral cycle comprised of 1) Production, 2) Distribution, 3) Consumption, and 4) Conversion.

Panel: Leveraging the Social Web (video)

Greg Cohn, Yahoo! (Moderator)

Khris Loux, JS-Kit

Patrick Salyer, Gigya

Brian Ellin, JanRain

Ro Gupta, Disqus

With the quickly changing social web landscape, web publishers and developers face real choices in how much to invest in the social web, what features to present to users, and specifically what and how to integrate. In addition, an ecosystem of 3rd-party technology providers is emerging around it, offering the potential for easier integrations and “one-stop shopping”. This panel will feature an overview from several companies integrating Yahoo! social technologies into their offerings, as well as a discussion on the practical and business aspects.

Panel: Building Your App On Yahoo! - The Partner Perspective

Dan Theurer, Yahoo! (Moderator)

John Atkinson, Total Beauty

Carrie Cronkey, Mint.com

Udi Graff, LabPixies

Chris Carpita, Snooth

Get an inside perspective on how to build apps on Yahoo!. Technical, product, and business representatives from Mint.com, Snooth, LabPixies, and Total Beauty will share from their firsthand experiences building apps on Yahoo’s application platform. This panel will cover important aspects of app-building including feature design, programming languages, and user considerations to keep in mind when creating open apps for the Yahoo! homepage and My Yahoo!.

An Overview of Yahoo! Search BOSS (slides)

Ashim Chhabra

An overview of Yahoo! Search BOSS (the most popular Search API on the web) and the BOSS Mashup Framework. In addition we’ll cover the relationship with YQL and explain a potential method for developers to get access to search monetization.

Think Place Not Space – There’s More to Geo Than Just Maps (video and slides)

Gary Gale

85% of all data stored is unstructured and this amount doubles every 3 months; 80% of this data also contains a form of geo term or reference. Geocoding, assigning a longitude and latitude to a geo term will allow you to show a location on a map but it won't enable to determine any further information about a place; its neighbours, parents, children or other relationships. You don't need to geocode, you need to geoparse, using a system that knows that Paris Hilton isn't the Hilton in Paris, that London, Londra and Londres are all the same place and that knows which of the 23 places called London or the 36 places called Paris you mean. This talk will show you how, with a little help from Yahoo! Placemaker ...

Track 2: Yahoo! Technologies for Developers

Building Your App on Yahoo! (slides)

Xavier Legros

Learn how you can get started building your app on the Yahoo! Application Platform. Developing on the Yahoo! Application Platform enables you to build Web apps that are available throughout Yahoo! – the largest audience in the world. Xavier Legros, product manager for the platform, will walk you through the core components of YAP and the steps involved it will take to build, submit, and get an app approved.

YQL - Select * from internet (video and slides)

Jonathan Trevor

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. With YQL, applications run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint. With YQL, developers can access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn how to call different APIs. This talk will cover YQL and delve into some exciting recently released capabilities.

Yahoo! Application Platform Technical Deep Dive (slides)

Tony Ng

Learn how to build applications for a platform that can reach 300 million worldwide users! This session gives a technical overview of the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), which enables third-party applications to be embedded within popular Yahoo! destinations such as My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! home page. The session will cover key features of YAP, including Yahoo Markup Language (YML), Caja, Open Social, image cache and application editor. Next the talk will explain how to build an application for this platform as well as best practices to deliver great user experience from your application.

Solving Problems with YUI3 - An Autocomplete Case Study (slides)

Isaac Schlueter

Isaac Schlueter will present a case study showcasing the trade offs and decisions that go into creating a new addition to the YUI toolkit to meet a variety of demanding real world use cases. In the process, he’ll cover some of the basics of YUI so that you can learn more about one of the most useful JavaScript libraries created for web developers.

Yahoo! Social APIs & SDKs (slides)

Dustin Whittle

Jonathan LeBlanc

Join this session for a technical deep dive into the Yahoo! Social SDKs. Learn how to quickly and easily get started with the Yahoo! Social and Data APIs in your favorite language. The primary focus of this session is how to develop social web applications with the PHP and Python Social SDKs. Find out how to fetch Yahoo! user profiles and connections, insert updates for Yahoo! users, and mashup data from anywhere on the web with the Yahoo! Query Language.

POIDH: The Flickr API

Matthew Rothenberg

Joshua Nguyen

An overview of the Flickr API program including comments on how to get started and new methods to play with. A new site feature for developers will be demo’ed.

Track 3: Innovation on the Web

Rewiring Yahoo – Cloud Computing and New Open Infrastructure

Sam Pullara

Yahoo’s chief technologist Sam Pullara will provide an overview of the ways that Yahoo! has been transitioning to a cloud model and releasing it incrementally as open infrastructure. He will cover our Hadoop strategy, our real-time initiatives, and our plans for a fully integrated content grid.

Panel: Open Innovation

Eran Hammer- Lahav, Yahoo! (Moderator)

Anil Dash, SixApart

Joseph Smarr, Plaxo

Tony Haile, Betaworks

Allen Tom, Yahoo!

Many new products and services are only possible via the joint efforts of multiple individuals and corporations. The social web’s biggest strength is its distributed nature and the ability of individuals to share their experiences across sites. The session will look at how communities and companies collaborate to create new markets by enhancing interoperability and data exchange. It will focus on how innovation happens in the open where multiple parties work together to create new markets and products that would not be possible otherwise.

Metadata in Practice (video)

Paul Ford, Harpers.org (Moderator)

Hilary Mason, Path101

Marco Neumann, KONA, LLC

Paul Tarjan, Yahoo!

Now that the metadata-rich Semantic Web (or "Linked Data" web) is here, we're finding many new ways to connect ideas together and using that data in new and exciting ways. In this session we'll avoid big-picture predictions and focus on the nitty-gritty--exactly how people and organizations are working to link their data together, with an emphasis on the nuts and bolts--the programming languages, databases, and techniques that make the Semantic Web a reality.

Panel: Bringing Your Location Onto the Web (video)

Tom Coates, FireEagle (Moderator)

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare

Aaron Straup, Flickr

John Geraci, DIYCity

The last five years have been powered by one dataset your social network. It's been the animating spark that turned photo galleries into Flickr, bookmarks into Delicious and university communities into Facebook. But what's next? What's the next block of information with the power to change everything?

One candidate is your location. New technologies are making it easier to capture than ever before, new models for privacy are giving users more control over how it's used, and just like the social network you can combine it with all kinds of stuff, making them even more useful and fun. In this panel, Tom Coates from Fire Eagle will talk to Dennis Crowley from Foursquare, Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr and John Geraci from DIYcity about some of the possibilities, problems and cool stuff that people are doing with location.

NYTimes TimesOpen Initivative (video and slides)

Derek Gottfrid, The New York Times

Tom Hughes-Croucher, Yahoo!

Derek will introduce the NY Times TimesOpen Initiative including an overview of the TimesOpens 11 APIs. Tom Hughes-Croucher will provide an overview of the integration between the NYTimes API and the Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) that enables APIs to be used from YQL without an API key from nytimes.com, to lower the barrier to entry for developers.

Building on Others' APIs: A Strong Foundation or Recipe for Disaster? (video)

Charlie O’Donnell, Path101 (Moderator)

Alex Iskold, Adaptive Blue

Christine Lemke, Sense Networks

Todd Levy, bit.ly

Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures

Abstract TBD

Hudson Theatre

Television: The Internet Revolution will be televised™

Russ Schafer, Yahoo!

With advances in technology, expanded deployment of broadband, and a demand from users to access the content they want whenever they want, the TV is no longer merely a device to get broadcast, cable or satellite programming. TVs from several major manufacturers are now enabled to deliver the best content from the Internet to TV including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, USA Today, Blockbuster, CBS, Showtime and USA Today. How will this change the way we watch TV? What kind of opportunities exist for developers? Join Yahoo! Connected TV's Russ Schafer for an engaging presentation on the Connected TV opportunity.

JavaScript the Good Parts (slides)

Douglas Crockford

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished.

JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. This session will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable and maintainable.

Hacking with PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf

An overview of basic concepts you need to know to use PHP for your hack. Accessing Yahoo's many APIs will be shown through copy and pastable example snippets to help make your night of hacking less tedious.