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The New Yahoo Developer Network

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I'd be wary of touching any Yahoo API that isn't a core part of their business. Developer enthusiasm isn't enough considering how likely, when Yahoo run into difficulties, they'll just sunset APIs we're using.

I want to say the Search API is a good example of a core business proposition: there's a revenue stream there for the service, but the search results are probably from Bing, so although the Yahoo side looks like it has longevity, the reliance and licensing of search metadata from Microsoft is a dependency that ups the risk of using this API. I don't really trust Microsoft not to pull the carpet out from under us when they've collected a sufficient number of eyeballs to consider the second step of a bait and switch.

If you're excluding search (and I think your reasoning is at least plausible), then what IS a core part of Yahoo's business?

News and email

Reorganizations?

They've made it clear that they're in the business of being a media company, not a technology company. So I would say that the media-focussed products like Tumblr are probably more reliable bets, but it also means that they're more likely to pivot based on unpredictable trends, rather than focus on any specific technological capability.

Yahoo is a holding company focused on large, category-leading sites in Asian markets. They also own a struggling portal in the US.

Ha! Like the old joke that McDonald's is a real estate company that sells hamburgers.

I thought yahoo were pretty good, hasn't YQL been running for donkeys? And YSlow. Or am I confusing it with another service. I'm sure I used it about 5 or 6 years ago.

YQL has been falling apart for years now. Sometimes it's down for me for over 48 hours.

YQL is one of my favorite Yahoo services, but I hesitate to use it in projects due to its unreliability / uncertain future. It would be great to have an open source clone that was deployable to Heroku or similar.

YQL runs a huge amount of the internal infrastructure at Yahoo. I'm surprised you saw it down for 48 hours unless you were blacklisted for abuse.

There is an open source clone from eBay that isn't quite the same: http://ql.io

Oh, I wasn't actually the poster who saw it down for 48 hours. I guess it's more that since YQL is accessing a bunch of external services there's a good possibility that something else was going on. As a 3rd party service it's a bit harder to debug, but that's just the nature of things.

ql.io looks interesting, I'll check it out.

YQL shouldn't be down for so long. It's likely that the underlying data source/API you were trying to access was down or your API key/IP address was blocked for exceeding rate limits.

I don't know how it works for outside developers, but I've discovered that they use it heavily for some of their own media projects including, for example, their video product Yahoo Screen. What that means for longevity is probably an open question.

If anyone from Yahoo! are here for listening: some of your servers' SSL cert was expired https://sa.edit.yahoo.com/ (expired at 7/9). I've reported to your security team (via hackerone) and they replied me as ".. do not appear to be any security implications as a direct result of this behavior. .." and it is still not fixed after a week of my report.

How long does it take to update the SSL cert? I hope someone at Yahoo! with good heart can pick this up.

Just forwarded an email to our company wide listserv. It should be fixed soon.

Cool, thanks.

Should now be fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

I am glad that Yahoo is waking up to the mobile & platform revolution after sleeping through the most important parts of it. Glad that it is not pretending to be "media" company anymore.

Flurry acquisition was a good act. This should give them a great headstart against FB.

https://developer.yahoo.com/games/ - Yahoo Games network is positioned badly. The opening tag line is "monetize your games" but I find the monetization piece missing. What it is trying to be is a platform for mobile apps and games., it is positioned as a gaming platform to get developers on board I think.

Yahoo's play in the ad exchange space is still nonexistent; however not surprising considering that they spent insane amounts of money acquiring vaporware from Bluelithium and others.

The current ad execs are also clueless and absolutely not reachable, I expect this trend to continue.

> Glad that it is not pretending to be "media" company anymore.

When you hire people like Katie Couric and David Pogue you are still a media company.

Yeah right. Good luck getting me back onto their platform.

Last year, our startup was heavily relying on their yahoo local API.

One day, we started having a lot of errors. We inspected the errors and it said "NO RESPONSE".

We started googling why and realized that yahoo basically just decided to shutdown the servers with ZERO notice.

Of course, There were tons of complaints about it on the forum. There were no response from yahoo. For us, The API was an important part of the product, and suddenly, our product was taken away from us.

No notice, no deprecation warning. Just one big middle finger.

There is NO WAY I am ever using yahoo with that kind of attitude.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19386027/yahoo-local-sear...

Doesn't Yahoo use Bing for search? How do they have a Search API? https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/

it is still Bing.

Do you hapen to know if the search is simply delegated to Bing or is it the Bing engine running against a different index (yahoo's) ?

Where is pipe ? it was definetly a interesting idea,but it seems it has been "abandonned".Is there any alternative,with a graphic interface ?

Try YQL instead: https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

It is still running, it now uses YQL as the backend:

https://pipes.yahoo.com

It's so good to see Yahoo! going back to what I've always liked about it: providing developers with good building blocks to create the web (and mobile) of tomorrow.

If someone asked me what Yahoo's core offering today was, I couldn't answer it. If you asked me that 10 years ago, I would immediately say search.

Is there anything comparable to Yahoo's BOSS Search API? Does DuckDuckGo still use it?

DuckDuckGo is indeed using Yahoo BOSS Search API. It's featured here: https://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/

Anyone from Yahoo Adtech around here?

ok, lets roll up the sleeves and code something :)

You can do that without Yahoo you know.

man this CEO really has her shit together ... female CEOs seem to make companies that know their customer base ... thats sexest but anyway ... yahoo is looking better and better

Being Techie I like the change Marissa is doing but Lets be honest under Marissa Mayer YHOO value has decreased if you remove AliBaba factor.

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