Developers Mixed on Yahoo!’s Open Strategy
Image courtesy of Yahoo!
By John Greaves
Yahoo! has unveiled its Open Strategy to mixed reviews. The strategy, which is designed to fit in with Yahoo!’s commitment to make its platform more social, is meant to make it easier for developers to build. According to the Y!OS introduction on the Yahoo! Developers Network Blog, “Through YOS, we’re rewiring Yahoo! so that developers can tap into benefits once only available within Yahoo! Namely, you can leverage the content, traffic and user base of Yahoo! to extend your presence on the Web.
According to Sandeep Mundra, whose company IndiaNIC has developed for Yahoo! since 2001, although IndiaNIC is not exclusive to Yahoo! they feel they get the best deal from Yahoo! and they are open to possibilities presented by Y!OS. “It’s very exciting and from this Open Strategy we probably link different kind of models available on the Yahoo! Developer Network to not only on the Yahoo! site but other sites as well. And they’re giving the easy interface so for a developer it’s very exciting,” Mundra says.
However, other developers say they are unimpressed with Yahoo!’s moves so far. Phil Michaelson a developer whose list building and sharing product KartMe builds on Amazon, Google and eBay says Yahoo! needs to do more loosening of restrictions.
“I’d looked at using some of their APIs (e.g., search monkey and Yahoo BOSS) about a year ago. At the time, they didn’t give the end user enough control over how to display data. Now as I review the terms, they’re too restrictive. Offering APIs does not make your service open,” Michaelson says.
A quick visit to the Yahoo! Developer Network blog reveals on the one hand a lot of exciting information from Yahoo! about various innovations such as The Yahoo! Applications Platform that “represents the first time that Yahoo! is opening up the “canvas” of Yahoo! to developers, allowing developers to easily author and publish apps across the Yahoo! network,” reading responses to comments on the potential shut down of MyBlogLog shows the anger and confusion some developers feel.
The potential shutdown of MyBlogLog is not an isolated event. According to blogger MG Siegler, “At a time when many tech companies are starting to launch new projects again and excitement is building, Yahoo keeps shutting things down.”
Mundra says he is concerned over one shutdown in particular. The Shopping API is scheduled to be discontinued as of March 11, in favor of Yahoo! partnership with PriceGrabber.
“That’s a question asked by my clients because my Yahoo! clients storefronts are using 100% Yahoo!-owned shopping engines and from the shopping engines most the clients are getting very good leads. Moving that shopping engine to Price Grabber I think is a very, very hard decision so we’ll need to work very hard on that.” Many developers like IndiaNIC will be hard hit by this because unlike Yahoo! Price Grabber doesn’t offer a free web services API. The YDN advises developers “If you wish to continue to display syndicated shopping results for products listed on Yahoo! Shopping, you must apply to Price Grabber for shopping syndication services. Although they do not offer a free web services API, you can find out more about how to apply to their program here.”
One thing that may allay developers’ fears is a promise by Neal Sample, vice president of Yahoo! Open Strategy: “How we are determining which APIs we support on the Yahoo! Developer Network.” Sample also promises to give more information on progress on the Yahoo! Query Language, Yahoo! Application Platform and Social APIs.
Despite these concerns, Mundra indicates his company will stick with Yahoo! both because he believes the company’s new social focus is good for business and because he likes how the platform compares to other available outlets.
“In the last couple of years social media marketing is buzzing the market and we’re getting a lot more clients who want to integrate it into their store, so with the Open Strategy it’s going to shorten our development time.”
Still Mundra says he would like to have better communication. “Yahoo!’s support is very good but we need more support and better communication from them regarding what development is going on so we can always ready ourselves with marketing and get support ready on that. We don’t want surprises,” Mundra says.
While Yahoo! may be able to rely on the loyalty of companies such as IndiaNIC to attract developers away from competitors, Michaelson says the company has to send a signal that it is willing to make moves to allow them freedom to profit.
“Yahoo’s restrictions on data display and service monetization lead me to conclude they’re not serious about being open. If they were serious, they’d just set a cap on traffic,” Michaelson says. “No need to prevent development from sites that are trying to innovate. They should let partners innovate, and once partners are succeeding, then look to profit.”
Sample says about the Y!OS, “One thing to note today: Yahoo!’s commitment to openness is reflected in the design of recent platform releases. That is right. The truth is in the architecture. Our Open platforms (YAP, YQL, YUI, etc.) will stay and will stay open. YQL technology offers all developers an open, scalable, plug-and-play platform with the same flexibility and security we require for our own production deployment. You have the ability to wire up alternative APIs using YQL’s Open Tables. Now that’s a commitment.”
Collecta
Here’s a great way to enrich your website or blog content: embed a free widget from Collecta that provides streaming, real-time content centered on search terms that are relevant to your audience. If you’re a developer of apps for the mobile devices, for example, you could customize the widget to search for information about iPhone and Android. What sets Collecta apart from other search offerings like Facebook’s Live Stream Box, is the depth and breadth of its content sources, which include Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, The Associated Press, CNN and Reuters.
Features:
- Free embeddable widget
- 10 million unique content sources
- Results are automatically refreshed
- Customizable search terms
- Customization options include header, control scroll rate and link to external style sheet to integrate widget with website’s existing look and feel.
View this YouTube video of Collecta search in action.
PositionApp
With over 100,000 apps available in the iTunes app store, it’s hard to keep track of who’s on first in terms of popularity. If app-watching ever gets certified as an Olympic event, you might want to spend some time training with yet another iPhone app, PositionApp. This new app from a UK/Sweden digital design studio crawls the App Store on an hourly basis and collects data from the top 300 apps across all categories and geographies. It’s a great tool if you’re consumer looking for the latest and greatest, a developer who wants to see how his latest software baby is faring in the marketplace, or a marketing type who wants to keep tabs on sales in markets across the world. The normal price of the app is $7, but it will be free for the next several months thanks to a sponsorship deal with AdMob.
Features:
- Up to date country-by-country position performance stats on the top 300 apps
- Six months of historic position data
- Browse by country, genre, position change, app name, free or paid, day, week or month
- Track selected favorites on your personal dashboard
- Highlight the biggest climbers in the top 100 and the top 300
Airplay SDK
Picking your platform is always a challenge for developers working on mobile apps. Do you develop just for the 65 million iPhone users or do you want to cast a wider net and develop versions that can tap into the larger universe of 500 million mobile devices? In a number of areas, it’s a dollars-and-cents call. You can make more if you go for the whole mobile megillah, but there’s also a corresponding increase in development costs - porting to new platforms can drive up costs by 20 percent to 50 percent. Ideaworks Labs has a better idea: Airplay SDK. Airplay is a native mobile application and development solution that lets you code once for the ARM processor that dominates in the mobile world and with a single click port the app to other platforms, including iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BREW and Maemo.
Features:
- Single Binary
- Open Platforms
- Scalable Graphics
- Proven Technology
- OpenKODE Compliant
A Mind of Its Own: Search Engine Technology Ever Pervasive
By James Zipadelli
Americans performed more than 15 billion searches in January, which is up 3 percent from the month before, the audience measurement service comScore says. The latest search engine rankings show that Google is still king when it comes to search engines. “Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million),” the release says.
Although Google spokesperson Nate Tyler declined to comment on Google’s numbers, he did say that Google Suggest Technology is an effective way to help users search for what they are looking for.
“As you type into the search box on Google Web Search, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing. Start to type [ new york ] — even just [ new y ] — and you’ll be able to pick searches for New York City, New York Times, and New York University (to name just a few). Type some more, and you may see a link straight to the site Google thinks you’re looking for — all from the search box,” Google’s Help Forum says. (Ask.com and Microsoft were not available for comment at press time.)
Kevin McFall, co-founder of the vertical search engine RushmoreDrive.com, says the level of difficulty “is pretty high” for anyone trying to gain a share in the search engine market because established search engines spend large amounts of money on marketing and advertising. However, he says there are ways a new search engine can differentiate themselves from their competition. RushmoreDrive.com was a sister site of Ask.com and was shut down in June 2009 due to the recession.
“One must position the value of one’s search in such a way as to change existing behaviors and habits of those who already use Google, Yahoo, AOL or Bing by offering them a reason to change and then delivering a rich enough experience to warrant their frequent return,” McFall says. “One must also realize that instead of taking on the major search players head on, one must find a way to backdoor them to get a slice of the market share instead of trying to compete directly.”
According to McFall, he was able to do this with Rushmore Drive.com by marketing his website as a discovery engine and a search engine. “We achieved the ability to deliver a richer and more relevant set of results through our unique index and page ranking algorithm, along with a distinguished universal results page, which delivered text, image, video and blog results all in one page,” McFall says.
He also suggested search engines that have a social component would be more successful long-term.
There are also specialized websites that find search engine technology useful. For example, Healthline Networks uses search engine technology to help customers with health and drug information.
Healthline Networks CEO West Shell says, “We’ve found out that consumer search can be complicated when it comes to health. Consumers and doctors speak different languages, and often consumers don’t know what to look for when they start.”
Shell says the technology Healthline Networks uses is based on “semantic taxonomy,” or classification, of health information. He also says the technology is always being updated to ensure customers have the latest information available and that they are partners with health carriers like Aetna.
Rich Kahn, CEO of the search engine eZanga.com, says his search engine is being redesigned and should be finished by late 2010.
The redesign allows eZanga.com to “significantly increase the number of sources we pull information from, improve our relevancy algorithm so that our results will be more accurate to the queries performed by our users [and] designing new technologies, that are not used by any other search engine at present, that will improve how we display our results to users in a way that will be more useful to our users,” Kahn says.
Apple vs. Adobe: Flash Developers Getting Impatient
By Lee Simmons
By now, the debate between Adobe and Apple over incorporating Flash on the iPhone is well known in technology circles. Apple has blocked Adobe from the device, with reasons ranging from Flash’s memory intensiveness and battery draining potential. For its own part, Adobe has addressed most claims and created a product that is just about market ready for launch on the iPhone.
While the debate may rage on, mobile Flash developers aren’t willing to wait much longer for the clouds to clear. Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 (CS5) promises to translate Flash apps to iPhone-compatible apps. That could be a potential boon to the estimated 2 million mobile Flash developers working today (compared to 125,000 iPhone developers).
Mobile Flash developers offer differing views on the Adobe-Apple fracas, but most agree on at least one thing: the debate won’t stop Flash from revolutionizing mobile apps.
“I’d rather be active than passively waiting for something that may never happen,” says Dave Yang, founder of Toronto-based Quantumwave Interactive, a mobile and new media development firm. “For a lot of developers, the iPhone market is potentially a great income source. But with the tight control by Apple, there are pros and cons developing for it.”
Control, Performance Issues
Launched in 1993, Quantumwave develops a variety of Flash apps for mobile, including weather, news, photo galleries and shopping apps. The proliferation of smartphones made mobile a logical target market for Yang’s business. Yang points to a couple of main drivers behind the latest disagreement between Adobe and Apple: revenue control and performance issues.
“It’s a combination of who has control over app revenue, and potential performance issues of the previous generation of the Flash Lite player,” Yang says. “The Apple App Store is the only official method to get applications, and Apple has full control over it. If they allow Flash to run on the iPhone or iPad, users can get a lot of content - games, video, applications, etc. - without paying Apple anything.”
The theory that Flash apps create performance issues on mobile devices - particularly that Flash Lite is slow, CPU intensive and drains battery life - is a common misconception, Yang adds. He has noticed no significant issues in his own development.
Meanwhile, Adobe has made a lot of improvements in its next generation of Flash Player for mobile devices, including hardware acceleration. The advances are promising for mobile app development, Yang says, and he hopes Adobe and Apple can reach some agreement in the near future.
“As much as Apple likes to say their devices provide the best Web experience, a lot of Web content uses Flash for not just video or games, but enterprise applications as well,” he says. “Without Flash, the Web experience on the iPhone or iPad is frustrating to say the least.”
Mariam Dholkawala, founder of Mumbai-based IGameStudio, a mobile game developer, likewise sees Apple’s restrictions against Adobe as more of a strategic decision than a performance one.
“I would argue and say that if other OEMs combat CPU usage on their handsets, why single out the iPhone?” Dholkawala says. “Flash content, if made open on the Web, might threaten the content on the App Store. Eighty percent of Web games are Flash-based and over 75 percent of the Web is video.”
Beyond the Debate
Mobile Flash developers like Yang and Dholkawala aren’t content to take the wait-and-see approach with Apple. The easiest solution is CS5, which translates Flash content into native Objective C iPhone apps.
“As the product evolves over time, I’m certain that we’ll see a lot of developers using Flash to create content for the iPhone/iPad market. However, there will always be a need for Objective C when these solutions cannot provide the adequate result of performance,” Yang says. “I’m open to all possible solutions and potential markets to achieve the best balance between ease of development and performance. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple reacts to more complaints that their most popular devices cannot play Flash content.”
Dholkawala similarly sees opportunities in CS5. “This tool would help us compile our Flash Actionscript into native iPhone code for application distribution on the App Store,” she says. “I would like to get my hands a little dirty with the tool and see what Flash is capable of with the iPhone OS on mobiles. Besides that, I feel that Apple and Adobe should work out their differences and have a real plug-in running on the phone.”
Lee Simmons is a writer in Austin, Texas.
Loading ...