Ms. Jen's transcription, d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

11:20 am Paul Hammond and Simon Willison - Web Services for Fun and Profit
Yahoo!

Flickr, Upcoming, WebJay, etc

Yahoo! - 1/2 billion unique users per month, 200 million registered users, 3.9 billion page views a day.

Building a site this big is hard work, lots of engineers, lots of servers, more concerns about uptime, more hacking attempts (photo of simon on a street corner)

Paul and Simon show a hypothetical backend. User database to Application, security issues, scaling a database, making changes is hard
How do we cope with these problems?
With an API!

Internal Mashup Culture
Flickr map functionality uses Yahoo map api
Yahoo Avatar (SW - some small thing like Avatar can be use around Yahoo)

Web Services allow us to build products faster.

Yahoo! Hack Day - Mashup or Shutup!
X: Dreamer Y: Coder Z: Hacker
Gives folks a day to build a prototype in a day and demo to your colleagues.
(Photo of Norm) Hack day makes people happy.
Innovation through making stuff. (PH - Hack day is also a hack. It shows the non-engineers that .. )
Wouldn't be possible without APIs

Internal Web Services help us innovate, as it is much easier to build products.

External APIs - full list of apis, developer centers, pulls all of this stuff together.
Simon shows some good APIs that he likes. Term Extraction, multiple Output Formats (XML, Serialized PHP, JSON)
Rollyo - searchrolls
hackdiary : Matt Biddulph's use of term extraction with Wikipedia
Yahoo Local Maps API : Ajax APIs and Flash APIs
IamCalTrain : by Cal Henderson
Retrievr, Bubblr, Favcol, and fd's flickr toys: Flickr widgets

Web Services and APIs
Makes huge products possible
allow us to build new products faster
help us innovate
aren't just for internal use

-- Find a way to contribute back to the ecosystem... The more people get involved the better it will be. -- Paul Hammond

http://www.paulhammond.org/2006/dconstruct

Question: (James) I am wondering about your mapping detail, esp. outside of the US. Esp. compared to outside the US.
Answer: (Simon) The mapping team is working out the details. It will be months.

Question: is there something for a Yahoo and a Amazon API, is there a system to mashup them up?
Answer: (Simon) YOu have to check the fine print for commercial use?

Question: how can you be sure that the API will still be available in the future?
Simon: That is something about the Web 2.0 movement that no one is talking about.
Paul: if you want to be completely self reliant, then you have to build everthing. If you want to use our stuff, you have to trust us.
Simon: This has not been put to test. There is a major incentive for major organizations to not lose the trust of the developers.

Question: We are sold on APIs, but how do we sell that to the upper management of companies.
Simon: There needs to be a business advantage. For external stuff, it depends on the company and the data to be released. Amazon and others have made a great deal of money for releasing their data.
Paul: There are reasons not to. If you are the major player, you may not want to release data. But if you are the first company in the sector to release data, then you get to define the usage and conventions (del.icio.us, etc).
Simon: If you don't get involved in the API market, your competitor may.
Paul: we started with internal APIs for personal use, before having commercial licenses.