The book will dive into a number of technical topics including:

• OAuth 1.0a and OAuth 2 for user authorization.
• OpenID and available extensions for user authentication, including deep coverage of the hybrid OpenID / OAuth extension.
• Shindig for constructing an application hosting container, including a look into Partuza to construct a sample social networking container.
• Distributed web frameworks such as Activity Streams, the Open Graph Protocol, PubSubHubbub, the Salmon protocol, Webfinger and OExchange.
• OpenSocial for constructing social applications.
• Caja and ADsafe for securing third party code on your sites or services.

In addition to specific technologies, the book goes into detail, with practical examples, on the topics that build the inner workings of a social platform or application, including:

• The online social graph, relationship models and understanding user identity.
• How to monetize your applications and increase your audience.
• Dissecting real-world application successes and failures.
• Understanding how applications and social networking containers work, from implementation to security.
• Working with application views, permissions and best practices.
• Case studies looking into how good applications go bad.

All code within "Programming Social Applications" is written in JavaScript for front-end examples and both PHP and Python for all server-side implementations, so that each technical offering is easy to consume and implement without much modification.

This book is currently available in the O'Reilly Rough Cuts program or on Amazon for anyone who would like to pre-order the text or provide feedback on the content. For those wishing for a print copy of the book, it will be available from O'Reilly in July from the product page.

To follow updates about the progress and release of the book:

• Follow progress on Twitter.
• Like the Facebook page.

For complete instructions and all the sample code used in the screencast, see the Getting Started chapter in the Developers Guide. And please let us know if you find this screencast useful.

In the implementation of this version, one of the most exciting features is a new API to enable gadgets (or applications) to communicate with each other through a pub/sub mechanism. What this means for application developers is the ability to remove real-time silos from applications and have them be able to convey a rich social experience to the users, by being able to play off of user interactions across multiple gadgets.

Here's more information on this release, from the 1.1.1 Inter-Gadget Communication section of the release notes:

Version 1.1 officially support an inter-gadget eventing system based upon the OpenAjax Hub. "The OpenAjax Hub is a set of standard JavaScript functionality defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that addresses key interoperability and security issues that arise when multiple Ajax libraries and/or components are used within the same web page." By incorporating this technology into OpenSocial, gadgets are now able to declare, as part of the module definition, events to which they are able to publish and subscribe. In addition, this specification has reserved several topic namespaces for use by OpenSocial. Please refer to the Inter-Gadget Eventing in the Core-Gadget specification for more information.

For full release notes please see the full notes.

Extended Flash Support

The yml:swf tag is now supported in the app small view and preview. Now you can provide a much richer experience in these views using Flash. Don’t’ forget to review the full list of supported tags for these views.

Install Everywhere for Apps

When an app is installed on the Yahoo! network, it will be available on all applicable areas across Yahoo! that support YAP apps. For example, if a user installs an app on MyYahoo!, they will also see the application on their Pulse | MyApps page. This means that users will no longer have to install your app everywhere that they want to use it.

There will be some exceptions, such as if some Yahoo! sites restrict the types of apps that can be used to a specific category (for example, sports apps, games, etc.). This feature will be supported across Yahoo! during Q4 and may be available on different sites at different times.

Notifications Count displayed on MyApps page

If an App generates notifications for a user, the notifications count will be displayed on the user’s MyApps page in Pulse. Notifications will let your users know that there is some task for them to do within your app, and should drive reengagement with your app. The Notifications API will be available mid Q4.

Based on the success of the first event, we knew that this event would be much anticipated both by the crew and the students alike. True to expectations, even before we landed on campus, we had over 250 registrations. We knew we were in for an exciting weekend.

The Hack U kick off was at 5:30 pm at the FC Kohli Auditorium with a welcome note by Muthusamy Chelliah, Head of Academic Relations at Yahoo! Bangalore, followed by Professor Dhamani from IIT Bombay. Hari Vasudev, the VP of Platform Technology group at Yahoo!, kept the students engrossed by talking about Yahoo! Open strategy and Cloud platforms.

With the informative introduction talks over, it was time for the tech crew to take over. Arnab Nandi, our Hack U veteran, delivered "Hack 101 — An introduction to Hacking" to prepare the students.

YQL is always among the favorite topics of any Hack U, and this time I presented the talk on YQL, how YQL can be used as the Swiss Army knife for hacks.

Rajesh Kumar followed and used his quizzing skills to keep the participants engaged. He went on to demo how to build YOS Social applications using YQL and Firehose APIs.

The next morning I started off with a demo on how to tackle issues with OAuth. Natarajan Kannan, a My Yahoo! Engineer, then went on to present a talk on YUI libraries, another favorite topic at Hack U's. He spoke about how to build good visualizations and presentations using the YUI library with very minimal effort.

Sudar Muthu, a Yahoo! research engineer followed with a talk on building hacks on the Yahoo! Application platform.

Hacking officially began at 1 pm. What impressed us was that the participants had thought through their ideas well in advance and were hacking away well through the night. Except for a couple of groups, there were no major hiccups or frustrations (sometimes seen during crunch hack hours). Every small success was celebrated. The students were proactively looking at various additional features and tweaks to their hacks whenever they found time or had a eureka moment. It was encouraging to see more than 50 participants actively hacking well past midnight.

Overall 30 hacks were registered and 22 of them were demoed. Check out the hack tracker for the list of hacks.

The winners were:

• Friends Circle - Best Social hack
• Jaago grahak Jaago - Best mobile app for a social cause
• Chat Normalizer - Using NLP to normalize short texts in chat
• RealChess - a multiplayer Chess Game

Other hacks that got a special mention for their completeness and creativity were Make my tutorial — a hack to compile data from various sources based on individual choice — and my personal favorite, Proximity Tracker — a hack that will remind a user about a task based on proximity to a service.

Overall the event was a great success, with fantastic participation by the students and enthusiastic Yahoo! Hack U crew. Big thanks to Jayasurian, Prajwal, and Prateek, who were all also part of the Technical crew who fielded questions and requests from the students. Thanks to Sanjay Mohan, Director YOS Engineering, for being part of the judging panel. The event was well organized and supported by the Hack U organizing team with Chelliah, Teenu, and Ruchika.

We all were really thrilled, when the young and smart brains at IIT-Bombay, cheered for Yahoo!, asking us to come back next year! That's the best response we could have gotten after conducting the event.

Check out some pictures from the event on Flickr. (Front page photo courtesy of Rasmus Lerdorf, web legend and creator of PHP.)

Can you read Chinese? Check out GodGame and Gamelet's Pet Crossing . Also available: Smash Snakes, Tank Man, and Crystal Digger.

We're counting down the days until we launch the wildly popular Zynga titles on our Y! network. Stay tuned.

Last week, we successfully went live with our redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site, focused on our YQL-fueled developer products and our blogs. The YDN and Hadoop blogs were launched on a secure, PHP-deployed yahoo.com instance of WordPress. It's also powering the CMS for Y! News' The Upshot site.

• The ability to import contacts from outside Yahoo! (Facebook, Gmail, and more) is now highlighted in the YML Share dialog box.
•  App installation messages are now pushed to linked Facebook accounts.
• Performance enhancements provide faster rendering and other improvements.

Here's more information on these features.

Promote non-Yahoo contact importing

The YML Share dialog box makes it easy for users to tell their friends about your app. For some time, users have been able to import contacts into their Yahoo! Address Book from other services; we now make this very obvious with an explicit call to action and an import link.

This means more users expanding their Address Books, which means that more of their friends will see messages about your YAP app. The increased visibility generated by app activity should lead to more installations.

Broadcast app install events to Facebook

When a user installs your Yahoo! app, we automatically create an Update message that is pushed back to Yahoo! Pulse, so the user's contacts will not only see that the app has been installed, but will also be given a link to the app.

With YAP 2.3, users who have joined their Yahoo! and Facebook accounts can have that Update message sent to Facebook as well, just by clicking a checkbox. This is a means of reaching out beyond Yahoo! to entice potential users, using the power of personal recommendations from friends.

Speed up performance

Aside from knocking out several known bugs, the 2.3 release of YAP improves overall performance. Rendering, in particular, has been noticeably improved. At Yahoo!, we take response time and overall performance very seriously, and we think you'll like what you see with this release.

The forecast calls for more social

In the next few months, we'll be rolling out more features to make YAP even more social. You can build your app now, enjoy the current social capabilities of the platform, and automatically gain access to increased social power as we continue to improve the platform.

Find out more

Check out the full YAP 2.3 release notes. If you're new to YAP, the Yahoo! Application Platform Developer's Guide lays out what YAP is, how it works, and how to write great YAP apps.

This application features the following capabilities:

• Slice and dice by keyword for updates from both within your Yahoo! Connections, everyone, and Facebook newsfeeds.
• Provide consumption experience within the app. Unlike in Web-search where people typically get the relevant result and leave, social content is more about users’ persistent interests, where users repeatedly seek what is new in their topics of interest.
• Discover and share topics from your social circle and/or everyone.
• Display trending topics to show what is hot in the current hour, day, week, and month.

The above capabilities are also available through YQL. Check out this YQL table for topic-based updates.

We built this application as a way to showcase how users can benefit from the Firehose API to discover new information about their interests from the social space, breaking the boundary of social networks. The trending-topic algorithm attempts to condense the overwhelming amount of information, to pinpoint what is important at a given moment.

Topic-based updates app in action

Here are some screenshots to help you visualize this Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) app in action:

View updates by keywords, inside your network, from everyone, and in your Facebook news feeds:



Enable consumption experience within the app, and let users comment, like, and repost:

 Follow interesting topics, and discover new topics from your friends and everyone:

 View trending topics on what’s hot at this hour, day, or week:

The YAP Yahoo! Apps tab appears next to the iPad/iPhone and Android app tabs, so you can expose your YAP apps to customers who are comfortable with the concept of small, easily-accessed online apps. Even if they didn't arrive at Appolicious looking for YAP apps, the Yahoo! Apps tab will prompt users to investigate. Your YAP apps are automatically added to the app database — you gain the benefits of inclusion in Appolicious without any extra effort.

Appolicious has created a deep social layer around apps. Users can follow each other, build wish lists, create app libraries, and engage in discussions about their favorite apps.

The site also integrates with Yahoo! in ways that make it easy for Yahoo! users to get started with Appolicious and share their site activity with friends. With authentication provided by user management provider JanRain, users can sign in with their Yahoo! account through the OpenID-OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which ties user activity to the Yahoo! Updates API.

When users rate, review, or add an application, that information feeds back to Yahoo! Pulse and beyond, generating more social activity. Your app gains authentic viral traction as more users find it in Appolicious.

To find out more about how to integrate your site with Yahoo! the way Appolicious did, take a look at our resources for publishers.

We're happy to see the addition of YAP apps to Appolicious, and we look forward to seeing your quality YAP apps benefitting from Appolicious user-generated lists, rankings, and reviews.

Yahoo! Mail is used by hundreds of millions of people, and an invitation from a friend is a lot more compelling than even the most targeted ad. For all of you who already have published your own YAP app, we have even more good news. You don't have to do anything to make messages generated via yml:share and yml:message show up in Yahoo! Mail. They're already showing in the What's New tab.

The Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) is an OpenSocial-compliant container you can use to deliver all kinds of applications: from social games to mini sites, from finance trackers to targeted advertising. Yahoo! users install your apps on the Yahoo! Homepage, MyYahoo!, the Yahoo! Toolbar, and Yahoo! Pulse (our new profiles product available in more than 30 markets around the world), as well as Yahoo! Games and Yahoo! Messenger later this year. With more than 600 million users worldwide, Yahoo! provides a massive potential audience for your app.

In the future, we'll be expanding the visibility of app notifications even further, so be sure to watch this space for more announcements.