next*

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator built with tag-photo pairs from Flickr. This prototype uses public, Creative-Commons-licensed photos and Flickr's open APIs. The object of the game is to find all the tags hidden (up, down, across, and diagonal) in the puzzle square. The photos around the perimeter of the puzzle are the clues -- the player views a series of photos and tries to discover the associated tag-words. The player's objective is to find all the tags hidden in the puzzle before time runs out.

PhotoSoup began as a hack for Yahoo! Europe's internal hack day back in October 2007. When our puzzle hack won the "Coolest Hack" prize, we were inspired to finish what we'd started, and share the fun with the rest of the world.

To create and play a new puzzle, the player enters a topic (or tag), such as "zoo" or "landscape" or "food." Or, you can enter your own Flickr screen name to generate a puzzle built with images from your photostream. Of course, you can also try this with public photos from your friends and contacts, by entering their screen names.

Who built it

• Lluis Garcia Pueyo
• Borkur Sigurbjornsson
• Vanessa Murdock
• Carlos "Chato" Castillo
• Simon Overell
• Roelof van Zwol

How do I get it

Finally, it's worth mentioning that it is also possible to embed a PhotoSoup puzzle on your homepage, or in a blog. Simply follow the link to embed the puzzle, and we will generate the code that you should include.

Popularity: 15% [?]

PhotoSoup started as a hack for an internal Yahoo! Europe Hack Day this past fall. Despite an approaching deadline for participation at the upcoming 2008 WWW conference, we could no longer resist the challenge, and had to participate. Over lunch in Barcelona, we started collecting and discussing ideas we could implement in 24 hours, that would have some potential to win.

We came up with PhotoSoup, a visual word puzzle generator that allows players to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and the photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time. The jury loved it, and we won the prize for "coolest hack."

Most of us on the PhotoSoup team work at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain. The Barcelona lab is one of Yahoo!'s three international research laboratories outside the U.S., and has a truly international character. We currently speak 14 different languages and represent an equal number of nationalities. The Barcelona lab is young -- just recently we celebrated our second anniversary. Our work is focused on topics related to Web retrieval, mining, natural language processing (NLP), and multimedia.

The photo above shows the PhotoSoup team members. Simon Overell is missing from this photo. At the time of our hack, he was an intern at Yahoo! Research, but now he's now back in London on a mission to finish his PhD at Imperial College. Lluis Garcia (Yahoo! Spain) is our man with Flash running through his veins. Lluis single-handedly developed the PhotoSoup front-end in Flex and connected all the back-end components produced by the other team members.

Saludos desde España,

Roelof

Popularity: 12% [?]

MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy talked to Memcached developers who gathered last week to collaborate on code at an all-night hackfest. Memcached is "a general-purpose distributed memory caching system...distributed under a permissive free software licence."

Here's what we saw. From Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale:

Popularity: 16% [?]

It seems like a long time ago, but back in March, MapMixer (originally named “Remaps") was born as a hack project at Yahoo!. Hack Day is a 24-hour innovation fest that happens every quarter. During hack days, Yahoos take time off from their normal jobs and bring to life their inventive, crazy, new, and sometimes world-changing ideas. After the blood, sweat, and empty boxes of pizza, what's left is a “hack,” which is then presented to everyone in a two-minute demo.

That's how MapMixer was built – during 24 hours of non-stop caffeine-fueled coding. (In retrospect, this was nothing compared to what it took to get the final product out the door, but more on that later.)

First, let tell you more about where the MapMixer idea originated. As an engineer for Yahoo! Travel, maps have always been dear to me. So, I was kind of annoyed when I was visiting my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I didn’t know where to find the visitor parking lots! Searching around the web, I found many maps that didn’t have the info I needed. Finally I found a PDF that had my info, which of course loaded the Acrobat browser plug-in and crashed my browser. (Seriously, nothing but love to Adobe, but the Acrobat browser plug-in often crashes my browser.) All I wanted was a single map with parking details. “Maybe this experience could be better?” I wondered… With that the seed for MapMixer was planted.

I decided to fix this problem for the upcoming hack day, put together a team, and built a prototype. The response was overwhelming. People got it — and loved the concept immediately. Only a couple weeks after our hack day presentation, the project was green-lighted for a public release.

Once we had the green light, we didn’t waste any time. Building MapMixer was like working at a startup, with one major difference: we had access to the amazing infrastructure already in place at Yahoo!. Our team had only two engineers full time, so we had to scrap around for part time help for all other functions.

With support from Adam Chang, a seasoned Yahoo! Travel product manager, we made rapid progress. We had to plan ahead in order to keep the several integration points with other teams internally in order. I got my hands dirty in all aspects of the product release including engineering, design, branding, marketing, legal, etc. It was an intense experience. (I regularly used the sleeping bag and 2 pillows under my desk. No kidding.)

Being able to launch MapMixer is a great feeling, and the coverage was terrific -- but the war was won by many small victories along the way. We are still fine-tuning the application and continuing to think about new ways to make it even easier to use and share.

I hope you continue to find MapMixer useful (and fun)! If you happen to have a good map you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to add it to the MapMixer collection. Check out this University of Illinois parking map or mix up one of your own:

Popularity: 7% [?]

Wow, this place is nice! Everything's so new and shiny, it won't take us long to scuff it up.

Why am I wandering the halls of this fancy new place called Next? Well, I wanted to tell you about this great program I run here, but first, let me tell you a little about my myself.

My name is Arlo Rose , and I came to Yahoo! just over two years ago when my company Pixoria was acquired for its flagship product Konfabulator. And really, by flagship, I mean that it was our only product. But it was an awesome one. So awesome that the concept behind it is now an integral part of both major operating systems (Mac and Windows) and is used all over web pages to convey simple, highly contextual, information to people. Konfabulator ran files called Widgets. Sound familiar? I know, they’re everywhere now! Makes me proud.

I’ve done a bunch of stuff since coming to Yahoo!, but my current project is running this thing called Hack. Hack is a program that's all about letting people who like to tinker with code have a voice outside their day-to-day duties.

The basic concept is this: take 24 hours to try and realize whatever you want to build; show it in a science fair setting and let your peers vote on which they think is the best; take the top 25 of those, show them to some execs and well respected peers and let them choose the top three.

Here’s where the Next piece of the equation fits in--we now have a place where we can share winning hacks. It’s an important piece of what Next is going to be about. When a project that’s able to be publicly consumed has had a little bit of polish applied, we’ll publish it on Next while we work out its place in the big picture. This is great because the developers get their work out to the world, and you guys, you know, get to play with this cool stuff we develop out of passion. You can’t beat that.

(Photo from Chad Dickerson )

Popularity: 14% [?]