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

Needless to say, I was shocked and amazed when I saw this statement on Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles this weekend. To summarize, they are committing to make open and public the protocols and APIs for their major products, including Vista, Exchange, SQL Server, and Office. And, wait for this, access to those documents will be free. Is your mind blown yet? How about reading on and seeing that they plan to embrace non-Microsoft standards, and “increase interoperability with open source solutions”? I’m going to take all this at face value and say, “Bravo Microsoft!” I hope it all plays out according to this plan. The IT world will be a much better place if it does.

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’d like to send out a welcome to one of OGC’s newest members, Microsoft. The SQL Server team is readying spatial support in the database with SQL Server 2008, which will have lot’s of OGC goodness built-in, like Well-Known Text and GML data encodings, and Simple Features for SQL access.

The Virtual Earth team has long supported GeoRSS in their Collections, and KML import and export is the newest OGC-related feature in the Virtual Earth/Live Maps product. Check out Steve Lombardi’s excellent blog for more info. MapCruncher is another very cool offering in the online-geo space that allows “regular” folks to upload scanned maps and perform some basic image rectification so that they can be overlaid on orthophotos.

I can’t wait to see what people do with all these features, and hope to see some cool cross-product mashups with all the content in Google, Microsoft and Yahoo geo-services.