The skilled Laura Lippay and Tony Adams too! A day in the life of Yahoo.

If you read this blog and you are a developer, you probably should let me know I often have work on neat projects.

I have project work for…

Open Social developers (javascript)

Search Monkey (php / xslt)

Facebook (php)

Be part of some of the most popular and innovative applications on the web.

I should also note that We Build Pages is currently seeking a full time, inhouse Perl developer for Troy, NY.

To find out more leave a comment or email me at gadgets [at] gadzi.com

Yahoo Searchmonkey widgets are now live in the search results.

What does this mean? It means that Yahoo has beat Google to third party widgets in search results. It means that those of you who ignored SearchMonkey can no longer do so.

I think in a larger sense what it means is that Yahoo is now going to have more widespread discussion of it’s developer products.

They will also enjoy the free press of such a public and search shattering move.

Oh and local SEO? Cha-cha-cha-cha- changes. Reviews will become quite highlighted and public, and Yelp will reap the rewards as will other companies embracing the Searchmonkey. Look at these results for “Honolulu sushi“. (fifteen percent click thru ratio jump for the pretty searchmonkey results)

Let’s look at what we are talking about, below is a search for a restaurant name…

The Yelp review result has a photo and and other information such as star ratings etc. This is automatically happening, mind you. No subscribing necessary as of July 31st.

This is a very big move.

How far behind is Google on this? Let me tell you. Google subscribed links have existed for years but they still do not show up in results, whereas Yahoo took a project from launch to live in results in less than three months.

I was at the launch party at Yahoo headquarters and it seems like just a few weeks ago.

The commitment they had to this project was very clear from the get go, but I am amazed how quickly they did this. Well done Yahoo!

To learn more about Yahoo SearchMonkey go here.

Vanessa Fox covers this issue more in depth here.

If you need searchmonkey development you can email me for references. If you are doing searchmonkey development, contact me. I am in a project that will rock but needs lots of people.

Anyone who uses Yahoo mail has probably noticed that they serve rich media ads (widget ads). I have been noticing more and more of these, and have been curious why I haven’t been hearing about them more.

Yahoo is apparently working with a few of their larger clients on this, but I have seen some things lately that are interesting to me. Here is one ad from American Express that I am pretty impressed with and features familiar face Seth Godin… (note: I am displaying this ad in a non-intended way here so it may not have full functionality for you, but it does when it is displayed on Yahoo.)

The above ad is very rich, and functional. Yahoo is serving some very impressive ads.

Widget/Gadget ads can do many things. If their usefulness is not immediately obvious to you, consider the options that are becoming available to any search engine (geo data, social data, databases, etc.)

Rich media interactions are creating a third dimension for advertisers that I hope will be understood by them. To advertise effectively online will mean pushing relevant information to your audience.

Widget ads provide unparalleled opportunities to do so.

Yahoo is actually quite on top of this. Impressively so. I look forward to them opening this up more, and working with them on this.

A great quick example demonstrating Yahoo’s SearchMonkey results was provided by SEOmoz member Steven T of LocateTV .

As with any new thing, it is great to see an example of its use with something we are familiar with. Stephen created a SearchMonkey result using SEOmoz….

Notice how that one screenshot says alot? The photos are a great addition plus notice the “Rating” field (where thumbs up and down are displayed) which illustrates great potential for particular stories being voted upon (Digg, Sphinn, etc).

See the full article here.

SearchMonkey could use a step by step tutorial, if Steven over at SEOmoz makes one, I will link to it and so will the SearchMonkey blog (they are very supportive over there).

By some miracle I was awake when this conference began at 8AM (ouch), and I was impressed by the keynote. I am happy I made it to see it, I was thinking of skipping it.

Keynote Speech

The keynote, as I said was pretty good. In it, Google products were highlighted, but the real crowd pleaser was when Android (Google’s mobile phone solution) was used to show Street View and the compass feature was shown. This feature allows the phone user to move the phone around and have Google streetview follow it’s direction. So if you are looking South, the view in Google streetview is looking south as well, and if you turn around and face north, then the view in streetview will look North as well, real time following of the users direction made us geeks break out into spontaneous applause.

Open Social was highlighted as well, and hightlighted well. Some useage numbers were given…

Total reach: 275 Million

Amount of developers: 20,000

App installs 50 million

Impressive numbers for something that hasn’t really even been fully implemented yet

AOL announced that they will have a gadget platform, and that it will be Open Social compatible. This wasn’t too surprising since AOL has been aquiring gadgget platforms for a few months now

Open Social Containers

Here are some items from Open Social containers…

iGoogle-

The new iGoogle is Open Social ready and Kevin Tom of Google put out some info…

-iGoogle usage:  50% USA / 50% out of USA

-Negative comments about gadgets will affect ranking in directory

-The Themes API will be updated shortly

- Canvas views for Open Social gadgets will be live this month

-Full open social compatibility… “this summer”

-There is an iGoogle developer blog

Imeem-

-3rd largest social media site

- Imeem media platform Open Social compatible

- Developers have access to media content (very interesting)

MySpace-

- remote container acces to MySpace data coming soon

- Full text search browser side is live on their site mail (via Google Gears)

Orkut-

- 60 million active users

- “millions” of app installs

- Rollout of Open Social to all users coming soon

AOL-

- My Aol will begin offering gadgets

- Adopting O-Auth

Linkedin-

- will offer home, profile, and canvas views for Open Social Apps

- Average user household income of 140,000 per year

- Will offer monetization to app developers

Netlog-

- Huge European social site

- 35 Million members

-4 billion pageviews a month

- will whitelist apps

- Offers help with localization/ language issues

- Monetization availible via charging “credits” and developer will recieve 65%

Ning-

- Adopting Shindig

- impressive numbers as far as users / social networks go

Google FriendConnect-

- Oauth and Open ID, and Open Social compatible

Yahoo -

-180 billion pageviews a month

- Social apps will be able to query yahoo social data

- Updates and presence data will be made availible (as in.. what a user is doing right now)

- will have canvas view

Here are the slides from the “Meet the containers” Open Social session…

| View | Upload your own

That’s it for now, I will put out more about other sessions soon…

It was good to be at Yahoo campus for this event, as it allowed me to directly and intensely ponder the uses of the SearchMonkey product…

I will build a couple of examples to illustrate the wide range of results that can be utilized, however at the moment I have a hangover (not sure why).

The developer tool is very rich with options that I want to explain in more detail but I am using a public computer to post this so I’m a bit limited. Let’s just say for now that Yahoo! threw a great informative party and that I left the event with a much broader appreciation of SeachMonkey possibilities. I have (literally) about 100 ideas for it already, and I will be discussing SearchMonkey and showing some neat examples of what you can do with it in a future post. I also plan to create a tutorial for it’s use.

It was nice to have a chance to chat with Amit Kumar (Director of Product Management – Yahoo!) He is recognizable to me because of the various SEO events he has spoken at.

Sorry about such a short post about a long subject, but it will have to do until I get to my own computer.

Here are some more photos of the event taken mostly by the very nice Jeremy Johnstone.

Thanks for the invite Yahoo! and the great t-shirts, hats, beer mugs, etc. Nice stuff.

More to come soon…

I am in the San Jose area for today’s SearchMonkey launch party. It will be at Yahoo! headquarters and it looks like it will be interesting.

What is Search Monkey?

In a way, it is Yahoo’s take on gadgets within search results… sorta. The example they use at their SearchMonkey site is a movie website that has a datafeed, can appear via Search Monkey in Yahoo search results.

Each of the main search engines are using gadgets in one form or the other in their results. Google has Onebox, Microsoft has WebSlices, and Yahoo has SearchMonkey.

Today (actually tonight) at Yahoo HQ we will get some demonstrations and more about the SearchMonkey project.

I like this Yahoo product, and will become very familiar with it. If you want to see what it is about see the SearchMonkey developer tool which helps you find and construct data services that you can use to build apps. Once you’ve built your app, you can use it yourself and share it with others.

I will be leaving the trail to attend a few things in the next three weeks. I hope to see you there, and also this will be the window of opportunity to get some face time with me if I am working on your projects. Contact me asap to arrage meetings, here is where I will be…

May 12th – Palm Springs (personal stuff)

May 15th – Sunnyvale, CA – Yahoo HQ – I will be at the Yahoo campus for an evening of drinking, er, I mean developer stuff

May 28th 29th – Google I/O -  I am looking forward to several goings on there, especially the MySpace/Open Social stuff, and of course the Google gadgets stuff as well.

Jun 3rd 4th – Seattle, WA – SMX Advanced - I will swing by Seattle for the SEOmoz party, and also maybe get a networking pass for the event.

Jun16th – New York, NY – WidgetWebExpo – I will be doing a session there on Widgets and SEO

I also want to mention that Smx Advanced will be having a developer day which programmed by Vanessa Fox, who has over 13 years of experience building websites, documenting APIs, and reading comic books.

Vanessa is starting a new thing Nine by Blue, which looks at the relationships between development, SEO, and online marketing silos and how the data from each of these areas can be used holistically to learn more about customer behavior. She also is features editor at Search Engine Land, a leading online journal covering the search industry. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search.

In addition to the above, she is also quite hot

There is a real benefit for companies to send their developers to this event, and I want to add that I personally think that if you are a developer and you are tinkering with the idea of broadening your horizons, this is a good event to go to. If you are thinking of working with me I would say the developer days would be required. (hint-hint)

Although this developer day is naturally orientated towards SEO, there are some very important basics to understand before starting a large project that will be useful to just about any development team out there.

My compliments to Vanessa for starting this.

That about does it, after that I will be back on the trail.