Catching the Haxo fever

It's great to see the wide attention that Yahoo's latest Hack Day is receiving, not to mention the fact that Yahoo! has clearly drunk the Hackathon kool-aid. At Plaxo, we have regular all-day hackathons, which we call Haxo, and they always end up exceeding our expectations, both in terms of what our fellow Plaxites create and in terms of how much everyone enjoys it. At our most recent Haxo day, people produced (among other things) a JavaScript widget that lets you embed your (always up-to-date) contact info in your blog or web site and an auto-troubleshooter for Outlook that diagnoses many of the common configuration problems our users have (connectivity, SSL settings, installed service packs, etc.). We've found empirically that a full-day hackathon once every 4-6 weeks is about the right interval--any more frequent and people feel like "we just did that"; any less frequent and people really start craving a reprieve from their day-to-day responsibilities. What excites us in particular about Yahoo's latest hack day is the focus on actually shipping working products--"from idea to prototype in a day" as Chad Dickerson says. While it's great to see all the internal demos of Haxo projects people have worked on, the hard question is always "how do we get this stuff into the hands of real users?" Some projects end up getting rolled into future versions of our officially shipping products, but others are better suited as "side attractions" for a smaller audience of interested users to play around with. With that in mind, we're working on creating a "Plaxo labs" site where we can release many of our Haxo projects outside of our normal release channels (i.e. quicker but rougher). The plan is to have them all hit our production databases (so you can try them out with your real Plaxo account and data), but hopefully to reduce the risk that comes with releasing software that hasn't gone through the usual rigor of design and testing by keeping the code largely separate. As soon as we have it up and running, we'll let you know. One thing that will help us (and others) ship new Plaxo features more quickly and with less risk is to make greater use of our APIs. As we continue to enhance our APIs and expose more of our core functionality, it will be easier to build rich experiences that interact with your Plaxo data and clients, yet which live entirely outside our main codebase. That's also why we're trying to make it easier to do simple Plaxo mashups like our Address Book Access Widget or the contact-info-on-your-blog widget mentioned above. Yahoo's hack day tagline is "mashup or shutup", so they clearly feel the same. :) Part of the task is getting the word out to developers that you have these components available to use. So look for us at a lot of community events like the recent Dojo Developer Day and the upcoming Mashup Camp 2 and OSCON, both of which we'll be presenting at. And please continue to tell us what you'd like us to build to better enable you to build on top of the Plaxo network! --Joseph Smarr, Software engineer and Haxo enthusiast