Update: Vik Singh had the idea for BOSS, and posted Yahoo! Boss – An Insider’s View. It’s money line is this, and describes the big idea succinctly: “I think users should be confident that if they searched in a search box on any page in the whole wide web that they’ll get results that are just as good as Yahoo/Google and only better.”

First, here’s what happened tonight:

Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search’s content and functionality into search engines on their own sites. The company that sees just over 20% of the searches performed each day believes that the new program, called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), could create a cadre of small search engines that in aggregate will outstrip their own market share and leave Google with less than 50% of the search market.

Might this impact things? He thinks so:

In both cases, Yahoo! BOSS is intended to level the playing field and blow the Big 3 wide open. We agree that it’s very exciting to imagine thousands of new Yahoo! powered niche search engines proliferating. Could Yahoo! plus the respective strengths and communities of all these new players challenge Google? We think they could.

And that part that was music to my ears (emphasis mine):

It is clear, though, that BOSS falls well within the companies overall technical strategy of openness. When it comes to web standards, openness and support for the ecosystem of innovation – there may be no other major vendor online that is as strong as Yahoo! is today. These are times of openness, where some believe that no single vendor’s technology and genius alone can match the creativity of an empowered open market of developers. Yahoo! is positioning itself as leaders of this movement.

Marshall, thanks for the great writeup. Yahoo!, thanks for making me proud.

Some worry that the acquisition will hurt the effort to make Twitter scale. It can’t and won’t.

I believe Twitter’s engineering team is headed up a mountain (they need to switch architectures at a low level), but that they finally know which mountain. True, it’s a tall mountain not quickly climbed. But they finally know their problems and have people in place. Better days ahead.

Others worry that Twitter’s scaling ills will infect Summize. I don’t think that’s possible because they are distinctly different engineering problems. Summize is “fresh search,” an understood and known problem that Summize apparently designed for from the beginning. Twitter, in contrast, evolved a product into a service that no longer matches their architectural model. It didn’t start out as (and therefore wasn’t built to be) a massive-to-massive (when each massively is unique, personal, exponentially expanding) real-time messaging protocol. I believe architectures exist for that problem space, but unfortunately that’s not how Twitter was initially built.

Put briefly, Twitter’s already on the path to health and Summize is immune from Twitter’s disease, so it should all work out fine.

While they are different systems, they may be complimentary. Jettisoning Twitter’s track and reply functionality to Summize’s infrastructure may offer Twitter engineers the headroom they need to roll updates into Twitter’s codebase with a bit of a cushion.

When his "Web 2.0," video came out I wrote that

Perhaps the so-called ’social web’ isn’t about connecting people, but about information conservation: If a person chooses to do something — no matter how small — it’s inherently interesting, precious, and valuable.

I still think that’s true, and I find more support in this new video:

Here is "Information R/evolution" by Prof. Michael Wesch:

Hap tip to the information aesthetics blog which is a great source for "data visualization & visual design."

Really, it just feels right. It works just how it would if you designed it yourself. Seamless. Flawless. I’ve been bookmarking about 20x more links since I started using this tool. Love it. Install it now.

Notes

• During the installation process be sure to click “sync” to avoid losing your current Firefox bookmarks and links-bar bookmarklets.
• Don’t worry, you can still save private bookmarks by clicking “Do Not Share” during the normal bookmarking process.
• You can still use “keyword search” and navigation keywords, but it’s a bit non-obvious. To create a keyword, save your link, then save it again to see the keywords field show up.

Enjoy!

Are you curious about Creative Commons? Why their licenses are? How they work? Why you should care?

If so, I recommend you head to the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog to read their new post that’s guest-written by Creative Common’s Creative Director Eric Steuer. He answers those questions and points to some resources in a clear and concise article well worth your time.

Discusses the experiences of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!; Cisco on the hardware/router side; local players like Baidu, Sina and Sohu; several journalists and bloggers active within China; and what it all might mean.

There are multiple eye-opening descriptions of cultural forces at play in China, and how those influence Internet usage in general.

All and all, a helpful and enjoyable primer.

But I think one of the coolest and most underrated APIs is the Term Extractor API from Yahoo!:

In other words, you point it at a piece of content — a news article, blog post, movie review or whatever — and it returns a list of terms, or keywords (or “tags” for those of you keeping score at home).

What do you do next with a list of keywords from a piece of content? Well, lots of things. Jeremy Keith wrote yesterday about a few ideas (that seem up for grabs, if you’re in a hacking mood!).

What if you treated each returned term as a tag? You could then pass those tags to any number of tag-based services, like Flickr, Del.icio.us, or Technorati.

So, instead of the simple “here’s my Technorati profile” or “here are my Flickr pics” on a blog, you could have links that were specific to each individual blog post. If I sent the text of this post to the term extractor, it would return a list of terms like “api”, “yahoo”, etc. By passing those terms as tags to a service like Technorati or Del.icio.us, readers could be pointed to other blog posts and articles that are (probably) related.

Like he suggests, it gets interesting when you let the output from this web service be the input for another service. I was lucky enough a few months ago to lend a small bit of help to the team that brought you the Yahoo! Events Browser mashup. One challenge of that product was to get images associated with each event. If you’ve ever worked with unstructured data — event listings are super unstructured — then you know that they don’t provide many high-quality hooks for understanding their content. The team tried doing image searches on venue or artist name, but the results weren’t very relevant or interesting, even when the parsed venue or artist was accurate. So, being the put-lots-of-pieces-together types there are, they decided to use the Term Extractor to discover more accurate, meaningful, and specific query terms to then find images for. Here’s how they summed it up:

To display appropriate images for events, local event output was sent into the Term Extraction API, then the term vector was given to the Image Search API. The results are often incredibly accurate.

I’ve only seen a handful of implementations of the Term Extractor API so far. If you’ve got a cool one to point me to, or a cool idea for a future implementation, please leave ‘em in the comments below.

He read some interesting passages, answered an very generous number of questions, and hung around to sign books. He definitely gave me a few things to think about, including a suggesting that we’re leaving the “poke” interface days (mouse clicks to ‘poke’ around an interface) and entering days of natural language interfaces, where words and concepts drive knowledge exploration.

I’m at work, sure, but it’s not a bad way to spend a Friday. (And I’m looking forward to Saturday too.)

At brunch this morning, I received an email invitation to play with the early “soalphaithurts” alpha of Riya. Riya is consumer facial recongition software. After you name a face, it will scan and auto-tag the rest of your photos.

The concept is great; I took 9000 photos on my backpacking trip earlier this year, some help tagging them is very welcome.

Anyways, I just signed up and installed the uploaded. It takes quite a while to upload and process the photos, but in the meantime check my screenshots of “Nine Step Registration Process” and the “Six Page Tour”.

More Riya details, screenshots and first impressions coming soon.