A bunch of us at Plaxo are spending the day (and night!) at Yahoo as part of their first open Hack Day. It's a brilliant idea and so far they're doing a great job of running it--from the logistics (plenty of parking, food/drinks, excellent wifi coverage, lots of help on hand) to the content (the talks have all been fun and interesting, and all their stars are out and about, including Jeremy Zawodny, Cal Henderson, Doug Crockford, Andy Baio, and more). They're also setting up an impressive outdoor stage for their "surprise really awesome band" tonight (no one would tell me who it is, sorry). And the event has already served as a good deadline for Yahoo to release a bunch of new developer features, like Flickr JSON output (yay, at last!) and bbauth for Yahoo! IDs (very interesting potential here).
We can't wait for the festivities and hackery to begin this evening, and we plan to stay the whole night (you can track the fun by watching the hackday06 tag on flickr). So if you see any people with Plaxo t-shirts, that's us, come say hi! And if any fellow hackers are looking to integrate their users' address book data in their projects, don't forget to check out Plaxo's widget and APIs.
--Joseph Smarr
The good folks at Mashup Camp have put videos online from all the talks at Mashup University. I gave a talk on behalf of Plaxo about how to use our widget and APIs to make a "smart address book mashup" on any web site. I had previously posted my slides, and now you can watch the entire talk (.mov, 77.5MB)!
What we said back then in June is even more true today--almost every web site these days is using address book info (sharing content, inviting friends, social networking, etc.) and for most of these sites, building a hotmail auto-import or Outlook plug-in is probably the last thing they want to do. This is exactly why mashups are such a good idea. For instance, at Plaxo we use Yahoo! Maps instead of trying to build our own mapping solution. Not only does it save us work, we'd never be able to do as good a job because it's not our core focus. Similarly, most web sites should consider using Plaxo's widget and APIs instead of trying to build yet-another-address-book.
--Joseph Smarr