Today, I was part of a big announcement we made at Yahoo!: Zynga has signed a partnership agreement with us to bring its games to our network in force. This is big. 80 million users play Farmville, on average, a month on Facebook. 28M for Poker. 23M for Mafia Wars. These users bring their friends […]

Just a quick thought that I’ve been meaning to write about but never do: Apple’s iPhone didn’t start out a closed ecosystem; as I remember, Apple fought the good “open” fight against all the developer and press grumblings when they announced their Web Apps strategy with the initial iPhone release. All they heard was whining […]

Nearly 5 years ago, I joined Yahoo! to work on its “Front Doors” effort: a re-imagining of its starting points (i.e. Yahoo.com, Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Toolbar). My work inside since has woven through several products and teams, but there is a consistent theme: working on products and platforms that expand the capabilities […]

At a recent Yahoo! Internal Hack Day, Mac developer powerhouse Karl Adam demonstrated an App he dubbed “Campus.” For any Yahoo! employee that installs it, one can locate a conference room by name or location in the campus’ multi-storied halls. The App’s visual representation of the buildings are handled by beautifully-rendered illustrations (by Kalani Kordus) […]

This past week (just in time to beat WWDC), my team released code to integrate Yahoo!’s Social Platform APIs into your Mac OS X and iPhone applications. Announced on the YDN blog and pushed to our GitHub account, the code gives any developer access to the following: Read the profile of your user (photo, nickname, […]

Chances are, when you’re out and about surfing the Web, you’re bumping into semantically-enhanced content.* In some cases, you see the benefits; in others, your experience doesn’t change. This fact is one of the great side effects of the Semantic Web movement: if you participate in enhancing your content, none of your users suffer, and […]

The Apple TV and the iPhone will (at some point) converge as a single development platform to complement the Mac computer platform. Or so my theory goes. Why is that? Apple dropped the Apple TV on consumers in January 2007 as a “hobby.” Since then, it has released several software updates, including a major on-demand […]

The Wednesday morning before last, I was excited to see that WordPress released an official iPhone application to the world. I instantly downloaded it, and added several of my WordPress blogs to the app. Aside from the annoying Twitter Tools glitch (which sent an empty tweet on blog setup), I was surprised to see some […]

Yesterday saw the release of Digital Arts magazine’s December issue, whose cover story featured 14 designers politicking about design trends for 2008. I was able to bring a little color to the subject around distributed experiences, whether those be widget-based or more akin to Facebook’s apps model. The Future Design 2008 article spans a number […]