This would not be that much of a problem, if Twply hadn't been sold for $1200 on Sitepoint. A lot of people considered this quite a small price to pay for a lot of private user information.

While the maintainers of Twply have now announced that the sale was for traffic and that the user database is not part of the deal, it *is* a bad plan to give out any login data to a third party. This is why oAuth is getting more and more traction.

All that aside, you can get the same functionality Twply offers without having to give any of your data away. All you need is a Yahoo account.

Step 1: Find the data

What we need is a data feed that contains the tweets people send with @yourname in it. This can be done with Twitter's own search. For example to search for all people answering me you can use http://search.twitter.com/search?q=@codepo8.

Twitter search also has a feed of that data, available at: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40codepo8.

Step 2: Set up a Yahoo Alert

You can then use this feed and add it to a Yahoo Alert, which either sends you an email when it changes, notifies you on messenger or even sends you a mobile message. To achieve that, all you need is the following URL:

http://alerts.yahoo.com/edit_feedalert.php
?url=http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%40codepo8
&done=http://alerts.yahoo.com/myalerts.php

Simply change codepo8 to your twitter name and that's that.

Step 3: There is no step 3

That's all there is. Technically the best solution to this problem would be Twitter providing the replies-as-email functionality themselves, but in the interim this should do the trick.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Please show your support by voting for BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), Yahoo's game-changing open search web services platform, in the Tech Innovation/Achievement category for the "best new technology achievement or breakthrough of 2008." For the win! Voting closes at midnight PST on Wednesday, January 7, but until then you can weigh in on the past year's most memorable gadgets and devices, best bootstrapped startup, best mobile applications, most striking CEO or founder, etc. Click this badge to cast your vote for BOSS.

The 2009 Crunchies' competition is hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch "to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year." At the time of posting, nearly 100,00 votes have been cast across all categories by members of the web community. This year's super-hoopla awards ceremony takes place on Friday, January 9, 2009, at San Francisco's venerable Herbst Theater. Why BOSS? Here are some compelling reasons from earlier in the year.

A safe, healthy, and happy new year to one and all.

Thanks!

~the YDN crew

CSDN stands for China Software Developers Network: a vibrant online community with over 3 million members who create about a million forum posts and 50,000 technology articles, every month. The network runs on an in-house community platform allowing members to join discussions and forums, run blogs, chat, get personal hosting, personalized search and recommendations. The community recognizes and honors contributions through a rating system that rewards the best content with greater visibility. In addition to the online community, CSDN has a book publishing house, prints China's authoritative IT technology magazine Programmer, and provides training and talent recruiting services.

In addition to the YSlow talk, I also gave one about JavaScript, you can check out the slides on Slideshare:

1. YSlow 2.0
2. Object-Oriented JavaScript

Needless to say it was a great experience to meet and talk to the Chinese developers and answer their challenging questions about YSlow and OOJS. And then again, how can you not like a conference that opens in the spirit of the 2008 Beijing Olympics - with cheerleaders!

Stoyan Stefanov
Performance guy / YSlow 2.0 architect

The first part of Asia Open Week was an internal application development contest for Yahoo! engineers, where developers from the Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia offices worked diligently to create apps that consumed our public APIs, services, and platforms, including, but not limited to, YAP, Open Mail, and Blueprint. Before the hacks began, presentations were delivered on topics such as an introduction to Y!OS, a deep technical dive into YAP, and overviews of Open Mail and Blueprint. Developers then had about a day or so of development time to get everything completed and ready for judging. We saw impressive applications from the different offices, with winners in different categories for the different platforms. Here are some of the app highlights:

Stockr
Built on open mail, as a mobile space app using Blueprint, and as an open application on YAP, Stockr took high marks from the judges. This is a social stock-trading game allowing you to make virtual trades using real data. Tying in calculations for stock ratios, portfolio graphs, live stock news, and profile and connection information so that you’re fully integrated in the social experience with your friends, this application was incredibly feature-rich.

Paper Visualizer
I must admit, this was an impressive Flash application built on top of the YAP platform. Using your social connection information, this app rendered your friends in an interactive 3D environment where they are displayed as "paper human" cutouts with the nice Yahoo! default image smiley. You can then view your connections by categories such as gender, birthday, name, etc. This is a unique interpretation of the social connection data, and aside from a few “paper people” nightmares it provoked, this was definitely a top app.

Next Auction View
I didn’t realize how prevalent auctions were in Taiwan until I saw all of the auction hacks that were developed. Next Auction View was one of the ones that really stood out. Another Flash application built on top of YAP, this app took raw auction feeds and displayed an interactive visualization reminiscent of the iTunes CD art display.

Primetime TV Guide
An Open Mail hack, this application displayed primetime TV guide information for shows in different countries. This app included features to let you save favorite shows to your list to keep track of what you want to watch, as well as a social dimension that let you share your lists with friends.

Below are a few photos of the internal hack event at the Yahoo! offices in Taipei, Taiwan:

After the Yahoo! offices celebrated the spirit of openness with a wonderful awards ceremony, it was time to turn our attention to the external community. On Saturday, December 20 at the Agora Club hotel in Taipei, YDN hosted another round of presentations on Y!OS, YAP, and how to develop open and OAuth applications. Developers, who had previously submitted their applications for judging, were then presented with awards for the top applications.

Below are a few photos of the external event, including pictures of the speakers and award winners:

The notion of “Open” that is being fostered in Yahoo! is one that I have become very impressed with. I see a change happening within the company where a unified idea is being integrated into all products being developed for the community. This same idea of open is one that gives back to the development community as a whole, where our products become even more of a freely available service to extend any application or website.

You can view my Y!OS presentation from Asia Open Week on slideshare, or click through it here for a closer look at developing apps on the Yahoo! Application Platform.

Jonathan LeBlanc
Senior Software Engineer / Technology Evangelist
Yahoo! Developer Network

The "Open Stack" refers to a set of technologies that work together to make it easier for web developers and users to manage access to user data across the Web. The Open Stack looks like this:

Thanks to Robert Reich from OneRiot for producing and posting these bite-sized clips of highly nourishing browser discourse.

In this first clip in the series, panelists representing three leading browser vendors, Joshua Allen (Microsoft), Mike Shaver (Mozilla), and Brian Rakowski (Google) respond to the question of browser security and the challenge of add-ons.

Thanks Robert!

We’ve talked here before about the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), and in October we released the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), giving developers access to Yahoo!’s tools and data to start building applications for Yahoo!’s vast audience and the Web beyond.

Today, we’re extending these technologies to Mail, providing developers with access to our documentation and guidelines for building apps that run on this new canvas. With a highly engaged and active audience of hundreds of millions of users around the world, the opportunity to create innovative applications that drive traffic back to your site and increase user engagement with your services is huge. Because of the sensitivity of the information in people’s inboxes, we’re adding developers gradually while we refine the application security and privacy protections our Yahoo! Mail users demand.

To create applications for Yahoo! Mail, developers will be using the Yahoo! Application Platform to build, test, and submit their apps. Developers will be able to embed a JavaScript application inside an iframe running in the all-new Yahoo! Mail. These apps can then interact with the Mail container—and do things like register a callback when a message is dragged-and-dropped onto your app, pop open a new Compose tab with app-generated content, or fetch social data from around the Yahoo! network through YQL—using the JS APIs we provide. They can also call out to your own or a third party’s web services, optionally using OAuth or a Flickr-style signed-call-home for authentication.

Our users are looking for applications that help them communicate better and be more productive. The apps in this first release - including Flixster, Wordpress, and Xoopit- allow them to share media with their friends and families, enhance their email experience, and to generally “get things done.” Mail is an essential part of people’s daily lives, and our 275 million users’ inboxes are already full of contextual information with tons of opportunity to build upon. It’s also universally sensitive data. We’re taking an incremental approach so we can learn what our users want and what developers need to be successful. Today we've begun by beta-testing select applications in Yahoo! Mail with a limited group of Yahoo! Mail power users in the U.S. In 2009, we plan to extend this functionality more broadly to mail users worldwide.

There’s a long list of areas we’d like to open up while we’re “rewiring Yahoo!.” As we expand the API list, we will also invite developers to build applications on the all-new Yahoo! Mail gradually and deliberately over 2009. We don’t have a wait list in place yet, but stay tuned to this blog for more detailed information in the coming months.

To find out more about application development in Yahoo! Mail, visit the Yahoo! Mail developer pages within YDN . Explore the docs and best practices for developing apps on the all-new Yahoo! Mail. It’s never too soon to start coding.

Mark Risher
Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Mail

James Kittock, My Yahoo! product lead, answered some questions about why we're opening up My Yahoo! and how developers can now reach the largest audience of personalized start page users.

1. What is My Yahoo!?
My Yahoo! is the leading personalized start page, with more than 20 million current monthly visitors in the U.S. and over 40 million worldwide. My Yahoo! users are highly engaged and passionate about finding great content and services on the Web. My Yahoo! is their dashboard for keeping up with all this information.

2. What are you opening up to developers today?
We’re giving developers the ability to create applications for My Yahoo! using the Yahoo! Application Platform. We are also giving developers the ability to create page themes (with background colors and images) through the My Yahoo! Theme API.

3. What can my application do on My Yahoo?
When you build an app using the Yahoo! Application Platform, you can create a ‘small view’ that is embedded in a user’s My Yahoo! page. The small view serves as a user's personal "dashboard" into what is going on with the app. As an example, consider a fantasy sports application. The small view is where users get updates on trade requests, breaking information about their players, etc. The small view has one or more links to the canvas view, where users interact most with the application: executing trades, reviewing player statistics, and so forth.

4. What are the key advantages of building applications on My Yahoo!?
As a developer for My Yahoo!, you now have access to our highly engaged audience of users who visit their My Yahoo! page multiple times each week. The small view on My Yahoo! provides rich interactivity between users and applications and will drive users to the large view of the app.

5. Are you opening up My Yahoo! to all developers?
Yes. Any developer can create an app with a small view. Any user can take that app and add the small view to their My Yahoo! page.

6. How do I get started developing my app for My Yahoo!?
Go to the YDN dashboard to start building your first new “Open Application” on My Yahoo!. Docs and design guidelines are all available on the My Yahoo! landing page.

7. How will My Yahoo! users discover and share my application?
With more than 500 million Yahoo! users around the world, we have an extensive and growing social graph that will enable viral adoption. People will share apps they've discovered and added with their connections via updates. Applications that use the Yahoo! Social APIs generate updates that will show up in the new Yahoo! Toolbar, Yahoo! Mail, and a growing list of places across Yahoo!. You can also create your own “Add to My Yahoo!” buttons for your app and publish them anywhere – on your site, blog, etc. The My Yahoo! content gallery will feature select YAP apps in a new category called “Open Apps” – go to My Yahoo! and click on “Add Content” to see this in action.

8. What makes an application compelling for My Yahoo! users? What types of apps are people looking for?
People want apps that help them increase productivity and save time by providing an at-a-glance view of everything they care about on one page. We think people will love applications that add social elements to their My Yahoo! experience. To help you get started, we wrote some guidelines for building apps on My Yahoo!.

9. What applications are you launching on My Yahoo! today?
We're showcasing some great apps from developers at Flixster, Labpixies, Mytopia, Playfish, RockYou, Zynga, and Watercooler. They’re a mix of fun, casual, and productivity apps. They’re all live on the site now, so you can check them out.

10. Do apps on My Yahoo! support the OpenSocial spec?
In your Yahoo! open application, the code for your Canvas view can include calls to the OpenSocial JavaScript APIs. The small view does not support JavaScript at this time. Read more about our support of the OpenSocial spec in our documentation.

11. I heard that you’re going to open up other parts of Yahoo!. Is this true?
Absolutely. Today we also announced that we’re opening up Yahoo! Mail through our next-generation “smarter inbox”. By allowing open applications right in your inbox, Yahoo! Mail is opening up to all kinds of communications tools from outside of the Yahoo! network. We’ll open up more Yahoo! canvases to developers throughout 2009.

Since then, Pew Internet reports have explored every aspect of how U.S citizens use the Internet and how it has transformed friendship, family, and community life; the way we work and play; the way we learn; the way public policy is made; the way media is distributed, consumed, and shared. Pew Reports have provided me with data to help make sense of hunches and observed behaviors, identifying patterns, describing trends, and offering facts where once there were none.

So, not surprisingly, during a quiet time early in 2008, when a Pew survey invited me to assess “scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020” and serve up some Internet punditry of my own, I couldn’t resist. But I didn't expect to find my own opinions and prognostications amongst those of the experts, thought-leaders, academics, and analysts who were consulted and amply quoted within The Future of the Internet III, authored by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, and released Sunday. I was one of hundreds of survey respondents “'working in the trenches' of building the Web“ and it turns out our views "were distributed in ways that paralleled those who are celebrated in the technology field."

The report foresees that today's mobile phone will morph into the dominant connectivity tool for Internet access in 2020, voice recognition will improve, the network itself will be bigger and better if not ubiquitous, and human behavior will continue to surprise, for better and for worse. Will we have gotten over privacy? Will transparency make us more tolerant? Will the lines of demarcation between personal and professional time become even harder to discern? Will we touch, type, talk to or think at our devices? Opinions and perspectives abound.

You can read the report online, download the PDF, or order up a hardcover copy if Santa hasn't slashed your budget.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

The internet is an interesting thing, as it is a bit like the matrix. Whilst normal end users see something like this:

Developers have the more outside-the-matrix point of view as we tend to look at the data behind the facade:

And if you are one of the true believers in web2.0/web3.0 where the web is the platform and the framework then it turns into something like this:

There is nothing better than yummy yummy data that you can retrieve, mix with the right other ingredients and spices to create something that is even healthier, more nutritious or even caters for special diets. In essence, giving access to data will make your product all the more successful as other chefs can cater for you.

Getting to the yummy parts of one or several sources can be a bit of an problem though. Imagine a tin of good solid food you want to get to. The easiest and most versatile tool would be a swiss army knife with a can opener.

The web equivalent of a pocket knife is cURL, a library that allows a developer to make scripts behave like a browser and get access to the source of any web site or web service. You can for example go to the command line and simply enter the following:

curl --url http://www.thedailypuppy.com

The result is the source code of the page that you could run through other commands to get to the bits you want to retrieve.

The same works for RSS feeds or other types of data:

curl --url http://thedailypuppy.com/rss

cURL is amazingly powerful when you know how to use it - you can simulate other user agents, send and retrieve data, even spoof cookies. However, just like with the swiss army knife you'll have to put a lot of work and effort into getting to the goodies. Regular Expressions are most likely the most versatile way to do it and when it comes to being a developer they are not the first thing to go into your head easily.

What the web needed was a very fast, electrical can opener that also might be coupled with a microwave to pre-heat your dish. The equivalent for that would be Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes is amazingly powerful as it gives you a very handy and beautiful interface to remix the web:

This pipe for example searches twitter.com for my name and filters common false positives. The outcome of your pipe laying is then available as a very simple URL that can take parameters and give you the output in a lot of different formats:

• Show as RSS feed:

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=rss&s=heilmann

• Show as JSON:

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=json&s=heilmann

• Show as JSON and wrap in foo():

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=json&_callback=foo&s=heilmann

• Show as JSON, wrap in foo() and search for "Christian":

  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=92feb878651258ca1d4575d3568766e9&_render=json&_callback=foo&s=Christian

If that is too low-level for you and all you wanted to do is show a badge that you can change the look and feel, this is possible, too:

And this is where it got tricky. Whenever you build an interface that is beautiful, intuitive and terribly powerful you will get one request: can we have a command line interface to this. This is just how developers roll, there is not much we can do about it.

The other issue with Pipes is that it is high maintenance to some degree. Whilst you can provide parameters, it is still a very graphical interface that is impossible to use for somebody who for example cannot use a mouse or see the interface. This might not be a large group, but in the end I myself find using a keyboard tool like Quicksilver for example easier than dragging and dropping and using my mouse a lot. When you want to change the functionality of a pipe beyond parameters then you'll need to go back to the editor, something that made several people unhappy, too. In other words, we needed a good, sturdy can opener that doesn't need batteries.

This is where the newest tool to open the web comes in: Yahoo Query Language or short YQL. With YQL you have a SQL style syntax to get very detailed information from all the services Yahoo offers the world and you can also access the web through it.

The main thing to try out YQL is the interactive console at http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/. There you can select from a lot of demo queries and you can see the outcome live below your query.

The real power of YQL lies in using and mixing Yahoo services and - with authentication - the Yahoo Social graph. However, for now let's just look at another thing to do: remix the web. If you scroll down on the right hand side you'll find "Available Data Tables" and there is a "data" sub-menu with the items atom, csv, feed, html, json, rss and xml.

This can be used to create YQL queries for anything on the web. Say for example you only want the names of the latest dailypuppy.com puppies, this can be done with the statement select title from feed where url='http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyPuppy' and wrapped in the correct REST call it becomes:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20title%20from%20feed%20where%20url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FTheDailyPuppy'&format=xml

Notice that you need to add a "public" before the yql to use the information without authentication!

If you want the data in JSON and wrapped in a function called myPuppies, just add the correct parameters called format and callback:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20title%20from%20feed%20where%20url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FTheDailyPuppy'&format=json&callback=myPuppies

Where it gets really interesting is the html option. Whilst Pipes has the option to retrieve an HTML document and get it as a string, YQL went further and actually allows you to use XPATH queries over the HTML document. Say you want to get all the latest images in my blog posts. You could use select * from html where url="http://www.wait-till-i.com" and xpath='//div[@id="content"]//img' for this:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20*%20from%20html%20where%20url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wait-till-i.com%22%20and%20xpath%3D'%2F%2Fdiv%5B%40id%3D%22content%22%5D%2F%2Fimg'&format=xml

The opportunities are endless, especially once you dive deeper into the YQL documentation and learn about joining queries.

Want more? Comment about your needs and wishes :)

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

This was my first BarCamp, and it turned out I wasn't alone. I'd estimate that at least 25% of us were newbies, which is a great sign that the BarCamp idea is going strong. New blood is vital to prevent this sort of event turning into a social club for the same group of people each time.

Photo credit: Katie Lips

At conferences, I usually like to go to sessions which have nothing to do with my day job, and there was plenty to choose from here. As I was going to be speaking myself, I thought that listening to Phil Winstanley's talk about "How to be a dead good speaker" would be a good idea. I mixed that with "Getting started with Arduinos - How to build a twitter monitoring Alertuino" by Adrian McEwen, which gave me a good idea of what I would like for Christmas!

To satiate my technical side, I attended a session on "Readable Perl" (which may just have convinced me that I should put aside my loathing for that particular language), and another by Cristiano Betta on "Using wordpress for OpenID." This finished with a discussion on where we go next with OpenID, particularly how to promote it to the masses.

Among the other sessions, I particularly enjoyed Alistair MacDonald's "Privacy open discussion," Ian Forrester's demonstration of Pacemaker, and "How to pimp yourself" from Richard Quick.

In all of the sessions I attended, my favourite part was the discussion of the topic after the presentation. While any conference will have question and answer time, the more informal nature of BarCamp makes it a much more personal and inclusive experience. It is great to hear other people's opinions, and to have both the speaker and other audience members comment.

Photo credit: Katie Lips

At (un)conferences with multiple streams you will always miss more than you see, but I have to say that I got more from BarCamp Liverpool than from most conferences I attend. Combine all of this with a party on day one including what was essentially a free bar, some of the best pizza I've ever eaten, and the obligatory game of Werewolf, it is safe to say that this won't be my last BarCamp, and I will be first on the list when Liverpool announces its next.

Ian Pouncey
Web Developer, Yahoo! London

YUI is now available on GitHub: http://github.com/yui. This has been a constant thorn in the side of the developer community - that whilst YUI is free (BSD license) people weren't able to commit or check out the code directly from a version control system. Git seemed to be a good solution, and there are instructions on how to use it available from the YUI team.

The team now also made YUI Doc - the tool that creates the YUI API Docs available for everybody. It is a python script and allows you to keep maintenance easy whilst providing implementers with valuable information.

Last but not least Todd Kloots, developer of the YUI menu, released a video of his tutorial on Developing Accessible widgets with ARIA.

Rock on YUI!

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

There are 2 things we'd like to announce regarding that:

1. We now support adr, geo and tag microformats. Yay!
2. In the name of progress, we have added an extra namespace to the IDs to make room for other types of extraction. Anyone who is using these for their microformat searches, can now find our structured data with these queries.

• hCard (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hcard)
• hCalendar (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hcalendar)
• hReview (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hreview)
• hAtom (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hatom)
• hResume (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hresume)
• adr (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.adr)
• geo (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.geo)
• tag (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.tag)
• xfn (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.xfn)
• RDFa (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.rdf.rdfa)
• eRDF (searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.rdf.erdf)

And as before, you can look for hResumes with PHP on them, Geocoded pages involving Santa Clara, or RDFa pages related to SearchMonkey

Keep monkeying around.

Paul Tarjan
(|): Chief Technical Monkey :(|)

Around thirty developers showed up at the evening to join us in the recreation area of the Yahoo office to learn about the ideas of the Yahoo Developer Network and get a quick introduction to some of the APIs, web services and SDKs we offer.

Jose introduced the Blueprint mobile platform:

And we introduced the audience to some APIs and tricks to use them:

All in all it was a great experience and we hope to be back soon and see how local companies, startups, and developers are able to use our offerings to build something much easier than before.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network