Scripting News: Yahoo mail API

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Yahoo mail API

Yahoo is announcing a new open API for mail. Interested to hear what people think. I was briefed on it earlier today.

A QuickTime screencast with Ryan Kennedy, Jeremy Zawodny and Matt McAlister from Yahoo, explaining the API and what they can do.

It sounded to me like the API allowed developers to create new user interfaces or "skins" for Yahoo's mail, through SOAP or JSON interfaces, but they said that it could do more than that.

I'd like to see another huge Internet infrastructure company provide what Amazon does with S3, and Yahoo certainly qualifies. This API is not that, but it's still a good thing that more of the user-level services on the net are being opened through APIs. And Yahoo is one of the leaders in that effort.

Wes Felter: "The standard API for email is IMAP."

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:37 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Feb Apr