(Mountain View) — After six awesome years at Yahoo!, Micah Laaker today announced his transition to lead product experience at Graphicly, a multi-platform social comics and entertainment experience working to bridge comics, characters, and conversations. Since joining Graphicly, Laaker has led the charge begin incorporating its first wave of social features in the product’s Web […]

Activity streams (whether Facebook’s news feed, Twitter’s tweet stream, Yahoo!’s Updates, LinkedIn’s network activity, MySpace’s Stream or those using the activitystrea.ms format) are all the rage around the Web now. In each instance, users publish directly (via entering your comment into a Sharing dialog box) or indirectly (by the system generating content based on an […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting “Designing Your Product as a Platform” for BayCHI’s monthly program at Xerox PARC alongside Dan Brodnitz (who presented “20 Conversations About Creativity”). In the talk, I spoke about what it meant to be “Open.” The word “Open” is pretty packed with meaning, and I rarely find […]

(Mountain View) – Christian Crumlish, Yahoo! Pattern Librarian and all-around talented design thinker, recently announced what the Bay Area had long been hoping for: Micah Laaker and Dan Brodnitz are confirmed to present at this April’s BayCHI program. Confirmed for Tuesday, April 14, 7:30pm, Laaker is set to give the first of two talks entitled […]

Nobody Wants to Hear Lloyd, originally uploaded by mlaaker. Shortly before I left the halls of Island Def Jam to come to Yahoo!, the company began promoting little-known Atlanta artist Lloyd on their Murder Inc. sub-label. After one spin, I smelled a stinker, and said so. “No, no, no. Lloyd’s gonna be hot,” I heard. […]

MyBlogLog has been on a tear lately, releasing FOAF support, XFN support, and verification of sites. Most interesting to me, however, has been their quiet rollout of MicroID support last week. ClaimID quickly posted, Fred Stutzman followed suit, and the MicroID blog alerted folks as well. MicroID, for the uninitiated, is a snippet of code […]

My good colleague Max recently released his Yahoo! Media Player WordPress plugin. This add-on uses the Yahoo! Media Player, recently released on the Developer Network, to automatically create an embedded MP3/audio player for every link to an audio file you have in your posts (or every file linked from an XSPF playlist). Additionally, Max’s plugin […]

Tom Coates recently announced the news I’d been dying to share: Yahoo! will be hosting an open Hack Day in London this June. We have all the official information up on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, as well as the official open Hack Day site. And, as with last year’s event here in Sunnyvale, this […]

One of the great benefits of working at Yahoo! is participating with a diverse pool of colleagues in our quarterly Hack Day competitions. Google has its weekly “20% time,” where individuals go off and build whatever they’d like; Yahoo! takes a less time-intensive, but fundamentally different, approach which really resonates with me: Every 3 months, […]

(Sunnyvale, CA) – While some had already heard the news via a LinkedIn profile update, Micah Laaker today officially announced his joining of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Laaker is joining YDN to build and lead the new user experience group for the team. The Sunnyvale-based company, now 10+ years old, began as the web’s Yellow […]

NetNewsWire is my RSS newsreader of choice. Originally developed by Ranchero Software, it is now owned and under active development by NewsGator. Built from the group up with AppleScript support, NetNewsWire allows non-NewsGator employees to enhance the application with simple scripts; due to this foresight, several enhancements (such as the “Post to del.icio.us” action available […]

Universal Location Manager Default location pre-populates content on new home page Users of the new Yahoo! home page are now able to set a network-wide Default location on their computer, thus allowing any location field on the network (including the three on the home page) to pre-populate with their chosen locale. Users can also engage […]