Application Distribution and Promotion
This section provides tips on promoting your Open Application for use in the App Gallery of Yahoo! homepage (www.yahoo.com). For instructions related to applications in the Add Content section of My Yahoo!, see the page, Distributing apps to My Yahoo! users.
Publishing With the Add to Yahoo! Button
The "Add to Yahoo!" button is the simplest way to publish your Open Application anywhere on the Web. When the end user clicks the button, your application is added to the App Gallery of Yahoo! homepage. To create the "Add to Yahoo!" button, perform the following steps:
- From the Application Editor, push your application live. (For instructions, see the tutorial section, Pushing Your Application Live.)
- Note the ID of your application, shown as
your_app_idin step 2 in Pushing Your Application Live. - Get a copy of the image file for the "Add to Yahoo!" button, currently available in the following languages:
- On the Web page where you want the "Add to Yahoo!" button, create an anchor with an
hrefin the following format:http://www.yahoo.com/add?yapid=your_app_id
Using the Share and Message Features
The Canvas view of an Open Application has a Share widget in the upper right corner. By selecting the Share widget, the user can send an email message to Yahoo! connections about the application. The email contains the application's link and screenshot. Also, you can create a user-to-user sharing form in the Canvas view with the yml:share tag.
The yml:message tag also helps to spread applications across Yahoo!. With the yml:message tag, you can customize the messages sent by users to their Connections. For example, you can change the subject, body, image, and the call-to-action URL.
Leveraging Updates
Yahoo! updates appear on many Yahoo! sites, including Yahoo! homepage, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Profiles, and Yahoo! TV. When a user installs an application on the Yahoo! homepage or My Yahoo!, an update is generated. To propagate even more viral hooks throughout Yahoo!'s sites, your application should generate additional updates. For information on creating updates, see the Yahoo! Updates API and Yahoo! Social API SDKs.