Experimenting with the Yahoo! Application Platform and developing our first FrontPage App
9th November, 2009 by Alick
One of the things I like most about the new Yahoo! Frontpage is how it can act as your starting point on the Internet, as opposed to just your starting point on Yahoo! Nothing massively ground breaking in that, but to change it to that was a fairly big move for Yahoo! I think. After years of trying to keep the traffic within its network, it instead worked out how it could use its FrontPage to compete, at a product level, with the likes of iGoogle, as well as make its homepage something you could personalise, rather than have a sub-product for personalisation (My Yahoo!)
One of the enablers of this new strategy are the FrontPage Apps. If the Yahoo! FrontPage was an iPhone, then, er, Apps is its App store…
FrontPage apps can be built using YAP, the Yahoo! Application Platform. We’ve spent a little bit of time here in building and developing our first one – which we called ‘Your Yahoo! Birthday‘ We basically wanted to show that we could take Yahoo! registration data and work with it – so we came up with the ‘Yahoo! Birthday’ idea. Basically, we grab the date on which the logged in Yahoo! users account was created and then apply this to a few URLs which use that date.
Unlike our first app outing, I think the best apps for the FrontPage I think are going to be ones that drive engagement – i.e. present a reason to use them regularly, ideally every day. Enough, ideally, for people to want to add the app as a key one within their FrontPage experience.
Also, apps which utilize info Yahoo!’s user data base, to maximise the experience of logged in Yahoo! users are likely to be more engaging. However, its not fully clear to us as yet how much data from the Yahoo! UDB is accessible.
Finally, partners looking to build apps who can either make data available as RSS, or who can provide specifically engineered modules for inclusion on a Yahoo! app are likely to have more feature rich aps as a result.
Would be interested to hear what other experiences other developers have had with the platform so far.
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