Friday, 25th April, 2008
Category:
Yahoo
,
Social Network
Yahoo announced a bold strategy to open its properties into a big social network. According to Yahoo's CTO Ari Balogh
We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers
Yahoo open strategy will give a central profile to users, and will connect all the products of Yahoo like mail, messenger, sports. Yahoo open strategy will allow developers to create applications on the top of Yahoo products using open social.Whats interesting is that uers can add third party applications on any Yahoo page including the Home page.
This means all Yahoo products will transition into a big social network. Not social network exactly.. according to Balogh,
We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don’t think of social as a destination but as a dimension
I am happy with this announcement, it will make social networking and third party application development more meaningful compared to the cluttered facebook.com.
Saturday, 19th April, 2008
Category:
Yahoo
,
Internet
,
Google
,
Business & Money
If you have a website and make money through
Google Adsense, there is possibility that spammers are eating a portion of your revenue by getting your site's legitimate traffic. A spammy search result on
Google/
Yahoo, might impact search traffic of some legitimate sites. Before the search engine algorithms detect spam and kills it, the spammer already had got enough traffic, impacting traffic of your site.
What can you do
If you find spam search result, report it to the search engine, which will ultimately help in boosting your site's traffic.
Report search engine spam using the following links:
Google spam report
Yahoo spam report
Tuesday, 22nd January, 2008
Category:
Yahoo
,
Python
,
Django
Today I tried Yahoo's Browser based authentication service.
Yahoo BBAuth also offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.
To enable Yahoo SSO in your application all you need to do is register your application, download this quick start package and integrate it with your application.
I tried integrating with Django and it was pretty easy.
Download Yahoo BBAuth python classes here
Extract ybrowserauth.py in your django project directory
Create a bbauth_config.py file into your root project directory
Add the following lines, replacing it with your appid and secret
# Put your Application ID and Secret here
APPID = ‘5KzQuKHIkxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxSztLwiAF7
SECRET = ‘0e68e582xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx0f25f4
In your views.py file add the following import statement.
from mysite import ybrowserauth, bbauth_config
Now assuming that I want to protect my photos view with YAHOO BBAuth I will add the following code in my photos view
def photos(self, ts, sig, token, userhas, appdata)# Instantiate the class
cptr = ybrowserauth.YBrowserAuth(APPID, SECRET, ts, sig, token, userhash, appdata)
if token == None: # If no token is found, create the authentication URL and display it
req.content_type = "text/html"
outstuff = cptr.getAuthURL('someappdata', 1)
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
#this will redirect to YAHOO login page
return HttpResponseRedirect(outstuff)
else:
# If a token is found, it must be Yahoo!'s bbauth coming back as the
# "success" URL. So, we validate the signature and do all the work
request_uri = req.parsed_uri[6]+ '?' + req.parsed_uri[7]
cptr.validate_sig(ts, sig, request_uri)
userhash = cptr.userhash
appdata = cptr.appdata
cookie = cptr.cookie
token = cptr.token
wssid = cptr.wssid
# Your photos view definition goes follows
Use example bbatestMAIL.py and bbatestPHOTOS.py file that comes with the sample code
A php example can be found at Dan's Blog
