I came across this story today, “Yahoo Opens Address Book Interface.” A quote:

Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use…For example, a programmer starting up a social networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member’s list of contacts stored at Yahoo. Yahoo users have stored more than 500 million address books, and the service is used by more than 150 million unique users each month. Opening the address book API (application programming interface) is the second major step taken so far in executing the Yahoo Open Strategy that Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh announced in April 2008. Yahoo Open Strategy is an attempt to link the company more with other Internet activities rather than remain a sealed-off, if sprawling, Internet domain. Through its open strategy, the company envisions outside programmers building Web applications on Yahoo’s site, Yahoo services being incorporated into outside applications, and social connection information within Yahoo being used more widely.

This article is not so interesting from a technology perspective — after all, Web service APIs are pretty common nowadays. What’s fascinating to me is the positioning of this decision from a business perspective, and how Yahoo! hopes to enhance its brand, increase its business, and continue to capture Web presence as it allows competitors and collaborators to access a key information source — its customers’ contact information. I hope they’re successful, and we see more of this kind of interoperability in the future.

This story reminded me that I hope to see more integration between geo-oriented sites. Just about everyone from Google to Microsoft to FortiusOne lets you create geodata and output KML, but as far as I know you can’t mix, match or merge data sets from different sites (except visually, of course).

Technorati Tags: fortiusone, google, kml, microsoft, yahoo

Check out Ed Parsons’, Android and LBS - in the stack at last. I agree with him that “LBS would only really make sense as an underlining infrastructure that is available to all applications, therefore allowing much higher levels of integration.” Congrats on the release Google, and good luck, Android.

Michael Goodchild makes a good point in “Citizens as Voluntary Sensors: Spatial Data Infrastructure in the World of Web 2.0” as he argues that there is a “dramatic decline in the supply of geographic information worldwide”, due in large part to the reduction in funding for national mapping efforts over the last few decades. With no change in government policy on the horizon, it’s natural to look to voluntary mapping efforts like OpenStreetMap and the KML community to fill the gap. Hopefully these “citizen scientist” communities can mature to far surpass what government agencies provided in the past. Not a lot of answers here, but some good questions, and it’s only 9 pages!

I’ve followed Jon Udell’s work for a long time. I’ve found him to have some of the most interesting, original, and clearly presented thoughts on information technology over the years. I’m giving him a blog shoutout because recently he’s been delving into topics near and dear to my own heart. Namely geo web services, exploratory spatial data analysis, urban planning, and GeoRSS. If you’re like me, you’ll want to check out his blog. Especially these entries:

• What’s easy, and what’s hard, about getting from Excel to a GeoRSS-enabled mashup
• A geographic analysis of local crime data
• Excel geocoding adventures

The “map butcher” answered my plea and built a handy GeoRSS export tool for ArcMap. Check out his post here or go straight to the script on ArcScripts. ESRI might eventually implement a nice, full-featured, professional GeoRSS exporter, but if you want something this year, this is probably your best bet.