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.

I was working on a Yahoo Pipe last night, and I noticed that Pipes will automatically figure out if you have created a geospatial pipe, and show it on a map without you having to do anything! And to top it off, you can get KML output of your pipe! Now if they drop the old-fashioned W3C Geo point-only format and support real GeoRSS they’ll really have something (hint, hint).

What this means is that you can create and export KML content from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! now. The mind bubbles at the possibilities…

By the way, if you’re actually interested the content of my Cambridge, MA Happenings pipe and not just the technology, you should know that there are a lot of good events that aren’t getting properly geo-located, so read the feed, not just the map.

I see I haven’t posted anything here for over a month. I’m realizing this blogging thing requires constant vigilance. If you fall behind, you feel like your next post has to be that much better, which makes you keep procrastinating, which makes you fall behind, and so on…
So I’m just going to get back into the groove with a stupid post. I was so amused to see Google Earth on Entourage I rewound (rewinded) the show to get a good shot of Lloyd gettin’ jiggy in the office at the end of a recent episode.

The big news of the week was Microsoft Virtual Earth’s announcement of a new version of Live Maps, and Google following days later with a new feature called My Maps. These are both ways, put simply, to do heads-up digitizing in a Web browser!
The importance of this is development is hard to exaggerate. For years the consumer marketplace has done street mapping extremely well. But that was just streets. “Real” GIS folks need to overlay data from various sources, right? Then last year OpenLayers let you have the best of both worlds, overlaying any arbitrary WMS on top of a Google Maps base map. With the merger of OpenLayers and Community Mapbuilder, expect to soon see a Google Maps base map under your choice of WMS and WFS services and/or embedded GML data, styled with SLD and all wrapped up in a nice KML or Context document.
Add to this the ability to create geographic content in your Web browser and access it via a URL, and a very interesting vision of Web-based GIS begins to emerge. It’s a vision that’s very different from the one the GIS conference circuit has been giving us all decade. I could expound on what I think that vision is, but that’s not really important. The most interesting thing I see here is that the architecture is so beautifully loosely-coupled that there is room for everyone’s vision to be realized. One thing I will predict is that the truly interesting time for Geo-startups begins now.

p.s. Does anyone else find it odd that such a major new feature was introduced by two pretty big companies in the same week? Coincidence, or something else? Please Adena get some dirt on this! inaccurate statement, see comments –Raj