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On Tuesday, the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) team celebrated their second anniversary of making life easier for front-end developers. The YUI is a set of JavaScript utilities and controls, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

There were not quite simultaneous parties in London--in a dark West End pub, and in Sunnyvale--at Yahoo's HQ. YUI has fostered a dedicated, generous community of developers helping each other out and contributing knowledge and code to the project. The Sunnyvale party celebrated some of the heroes of this far-flung community. You'll find ample coverage on the YUI blog (thanks Eric!) and more good stuff on the Y! Developer Network blog.

Christian Heilmann is a Yahoo technology evangelist based in the U.K -- Christian started warming up for the festivities a week earlier, with a talk he delivered at GeekUp Leeds, a grassroots gathering of web developers in the north west of England. Christian's presentation takes a head-on approach to YUI's terrible twos with a compelling answer to the question, "Why the YUI?" (or furthermore, "why any library"). Watch for yourself:

You can follow along with the presentation, Y the YUI? over at slideshare.net.

Big thanks to Dominic Hodgson, and the folks from NorthCast, who documented Christian's presentation at Geekup Leeds, at the Old Broadcasting House, and gave us permission to distribute their video by embedding it here.

If you just want to see some party photos of 60 or 70 happy developers drinking beers in London ("in a dark and dingy pub so the lighting is rather moody"), here's a set for you:
YUI Library and YPattern Library Turn 2!

Some stunning photos of happy developers, this time from Sunnyvale, thanks to Dustin Diaz, who has generously let us use some of them in the "Who We Are" slideshow above on the right rail:
YUI 2nd Birthday

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Since last week's exhilarating news that Yahoo! will become a provider of OpenID 2.0 on January 30, 2008, there's been plenty of conversation about the implementation, the benefits, and the impact this will have on millions and millions of Yahoo! users.

Ash Patel, executive VP of platforms and infrastructure at Yahoo! says,

“Supporting OpenID gives our users the freedom to leverage their Yahoo! ID both on and off the Yahoo! network, reducing the number of usernames and passwords they need to remember and offering a single, trusted partner for managing their online identity.”

Individuals will be able to use a Yahoo! OpenID to log into sites that support the OpenID 2.0 protocol. It will be easy for Yahoo! ID holders to move seamlessly across the Web without creating new accounts for each new site they want to explore -- a huge convenience!

As of now, Yahoo! does not plan to become a relying party (a site that verifies OpenID ownership) nor does it plan to implement attribute exchange, although Yahoo! intends to expand support of OpenID as the protocol evolves.

I wanted a more in-depth understanding of OpenID. I went exploring on SlideShare -- the Web's largest community for sharing, discussing, and disseminating presentations and online slideshows -- and an amazingly useful, engaging service. (If you thought powerpoint and poetry were totally incompatible, SlideShare might just make you change your mind.)

This presentation by David Recordon and Brian Ellin is from last spring's Web 2.0 Expo conference.

| View | Upload your own

You can read more about Yahoo! and OpenID on Yodel Anecdotal, where Scott Kveton, Chairman of the Board of Directors, OpenID Foundation, has guest-blogged the news.

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Last week I discovered photophlow, a web app that some are describing as the reincarnation of Flickr Live. Photophlow launched quietly over the holidays and is still in invite-only beta, built by a startup worth watching called Oortle.

Photophlow lets you share your Flickr photos in real time and interact with photographers and their photos in a dynamic chat room environment that feels at times like a virtual world. The application embraces a collection of powerful APIs from a variety of popular services - Flickr (obviously), Twitter, Tumblr - and connects to the instant messaging client of your choice. Even the venerable Yahoo! Search term extractor manages to contribute to the playful ambiance.

Photophlow wires the social and the semantic together to create delightful, unexpected interactions between pholks and their photos. Encounters take place in the present tense, but are preserved and reflected back into the Flickr photostream of the participants as new metadata -- comments, contacts, collaborations. The phph experience amplifies the power of Flickr as an open platform: this app finds new ways to unlock walled gardens of sociability (you know the profile pages I'm talking about) and cultivates an environment where truly original media-sharing activity can flourish. Talk about hybrid vigor: it's now possible to tweet a photo. Or use a Flickr machine tag such as phlow:emote=doh to express an emotion. Or get an IM notification when something happens in your photophlow room.

Photophlow was created by a handful of people, led by Neil Berkman, a veteran software developer who's been building inventive social apps and thinking about "real-time media sharing" since the days of web 1.0; when social media buzzwords were a rare commodity, an open API was hard to find, and the social graph was barely a twinkle in Dave McClure's eye.

A bit of history (from Eric Costello, who was there making it): The original Flickr evolved from a web-based massively multiplayer game called Game Neverending. (If you're a Flickr user and student of URLs, as I am, you've probably wondered about the .gne file ending you sometimes see on your travels through Flickr. Now you know.). Along the way to becoming the world-class photosharing site it is today, Flickr was a flash app that let you chat about shared photos in real time. Back then, none of this interaction was preserved asynchronously. As Flickr evolved in response to feedback from the lively community it attracted, the Flash app was retired indefinitely, and "Flickr Live" as it was called, lived on only in the dreams and schemes of a few active and inventive early members.

Neil had the good fortune to hook up with one of these passionate ringleaders -- Bryan "striatic" Partington, one of the early flickrati and a longtime advocate for real-time Flickr. Striatic proved to be the perfect co-conspirator -- an antic photo poet in a bowler hat, a skilled UI designer, and natural born storyteller. They collaborated on photophlow for over a year before meeting face to face. This past fall, at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit, they showed their project to Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield and he gave it his blessing. Photophlow the phenom has just begun.

You can learn lots more about photophlow from the following resources:
• eHub interviews photophlow
• Demo Girl: 3 Words Describe PhotoPhlow: Totally. Freaking. Addicting.
• PhotoDump 01-13-2008

  There's also a photophlow group on Flickr to explore.

  NOTE: Here at next.yahoo we have a dozen a few photophlow invites left to share. Leave a comment and let us know if you want one.

  Popularity: 15% [?]

Mercifully, the time for year-in-review posts and top ten lists is almost behind us. Mind you, there were plenty of interesting recaps of media and technology action in the past year, not to mention lists of popular techie podcasts from IT Conversations, viral videos (and the difference between memorable and most viewed), social media moments, and lists of lists.

This week, as colleagues drifted back into the office, I spent some time exploring 2008 predictions covering web technology, digital media, and Internet industry trends. I was looking for common threads and for insight.

Battelle is bullish on advertising markets despite the acknowledged economic downturn. He focuses most of his scrutiny on what lies ahead for the big players and their disruptors. He believes that

"2008 will also be seen as the year that proves Conversational Marketing as a new form of advertising, and by the end of the year, adding value to a customer's life through marketing will be seen as a necessity as opposed to an experiment."

Micropersuasion's Steve Rubel extends a kindred idea in the first post of his series on digital trends in 2008. In Media Battle Advertisers for Eyeballs, he suggests that the traditionally symbiotic relationship between media and advertising is under threat in a digital environment when "any brand can become a media company" and make its own appeal to a consumer's attention, start its own conversation. His second essay introduces Living Room 2.0 (just in time for CES!).

J.P. Morgan's Internet analyst, Imran Khan, released a 312-page report titled "Nothing but Net," which predicts that leading Internet stocks will continue to grow and outperform the broader markets.

And in an utterly different vein, Edge.org launched its always invigorating World Question Center 2008 site, where 163 really big thinkers from an extraordinary range of disciplines take on the question, "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" This is savory fare for the philosophically inclined. After all, doesn't a change of mind sometimes propel a person out of the past and into a future they had not imagined?

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Last week our friends over at Flickr HQ released two cool new treats for Flickrati. On the same day! Check out the new stats for Pro account holders, and the free new Uploadr 3.0 for one and all. There's a Windows Vista and XP version and one for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.4. (The older uploader is still supported, as is the web-based upload form.)

If you're a Flickr pro account holder, you can now get full-on Flickr stats for your photos with detailed daily, weekly, and all-time view counts, referrers, and nearly everything else numeric you might want to know about your images and who's looking at them. If you upgrade now to a pro account, 28 days of stats await you. Just give the Flickr folks about 24 hours to get your stats up and running.

And even if you're not in LaughingSquid's league of "millions served" you're bound to discover something unexpected.

The new uploader has even more offline functionality, "plus, for the first time ever, you can reorder your photos before uploading by simply dragging them into place!" And, for folks like me, who manage more than one Flickr account, once you've authorized the uploader to access your accounts, the new tool is just as easy as the old one for switching between multiple accounts.

Finally, if you've been missing from Flickr since the first day of Hanukah, you might not know about the new online editing feature. Flickr's new partnership with Piknick makes it possible to edit your photos splendidly and seamlessly online. For free!

Maybe we should call it a hat trick. Flickr, the loldolphins love you.

Popularity: 11% [?]