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Hi, Next readers! I'm Gordon Luk, a co-founder of Upcoming.org, and the team leader at Brickhouse for a top-secret Yahoo! project called BravoNation that is going into closed public beta today. I'm writing on Next to give the readers a special sneak preview. BravoNation is a useful website to let people give achievements (we call them Bravos) to people, and it's also a platform to let developers build connected achievement systems on the web.

Have you ever had a friend, loved one, or coworker do something for you that was totally amazing, and all you could do was say "thanks?" The other day, Kevin Cheng, the interaction designer for BravoNation, dropped off my cell phone at my cubicle when I left it in his car after a really long day at work. When I found it the next day, I went to text him, but realized that I could send him a Bravo instead! Then it would give him a persistent, personal, and fun little thing to keep, show off, and syndicate on his website, blog, or social networks.

Let's also say that Kevin runs a website that offers BravoNation-powered awards. Using the BravoNation platform, he defines a "Best Comment of the Day" Bravo, then gives that out for an excellent comment about interaction design. This works for all types of sites, which would typically give out either editorial awards or milestone achievements to their members for special events (100th comment, 15th recommendation, 2 years of membership, etc).

If your site allows people to upload car profiles, for instance, you'd be able to map car profile IDs over to award IDs, and query them back on each car profile. You'd just send our REST API a ping whenever someone (or something) earns an award, and then you'd be able to query that back at any time. The integration can be completely seamless - we won't get in the way. However, the icing on the cake is that you could build a special pathway to let people with BravoNation award collections come over and "link" their accounts together. They'd get a special button with your application's icon, and all of their Bravos received on your side would suddenly be available for them to show off on their profiles and their syndicated identities.

It bears saying that all of this is highly experimental, so we're calling it a Rough Draft. We won't know until later which parts are really useful to people, and so we're growing the membership pretty cautiously while changing the site itself very quickly. Also, since our developer API is likely to evolve quickly over the next couple of months, we'll be handpicking skilled integrators with experience to experiment with the APIs and help us build up stability and performance to really high levels. It's just another way that Brickhouse is experimenting with quicker ways to bring new functionality to its audience more quickly. We have high hopes that by the time we open the gates to BravoNation for all, it'll be a well-proven concept.

Many thanks go out to the core BravoNation team, including Kevin Cheng, Ernie Hsiung, Niki Bobb, Ray McClure, and Jeffery Bennett, and also to all the Yahoos all over the company that have been helping us refine our concept and make it production ready! For another in-depth story about the origins of BravoNation, see Andy Baio's post on Waxy.org.

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