The hackers are coming

Posted September 28th, 2006 at 11:38 pm by David Filo, Chief Yahoo

 4 Comments / Filed in: Cool Stuff, Trends & News

Ever since Jerry and I started Yahoo! 11 years ago, we’ve made it a priority to stay loyal to our developer roots — creating useful and significant products that make the Internet more relevant to the global community. Along the way we’ve met a lot of developers with the same goals.

This loose network of “hackers” has gelled into a large connected community that takes an untraditional approach to creating new applications, products and services, much as Yahoo! has done in the last decade. For this community, hacking is a good thing — yielding ideas and innovations that are clever, creative and original.

We don’t claim to have supreme knowledge to be able to come up with the best solutions. We look to Yahoo! developers and users to contribute their ideas, and to take to the next level the enormous scale and infrastructure that Yahoo! is proud to be able to provide.

And we don’t want to hog it — the spirit of openness that is pervasive at Yahoo! will prevail this weekend as 500 developers from as far away as Australia, Canada, Florida and Chicago (and as close as the next exit down the freeway) descend on our campus tomorrow for our first Open Hack Day.

This will be the first time we’ve opened up the Yahoo! campus to developers from outside the company. We’ll give them lots of coffee and lots of space to be creative, and just under 24 hours to demonstrate their creativity and originality. At the end, hack demos will be judged by a panel of luminaries, and special awards given for the coolest hacks. And we’re really excited about the amazing musical guest performing on campus Friday night, which should be a great start to the hack-a-thon and the perfect way to get our creative juices flowing.

The biggest thing that has made Yahoo! successful has been the community we’ve been able to build, and the developer community is one of the most passionate constituents I’ve seen. I can’t wait to see what they come up with this weekend!

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4 Comments Add your own

Silvio Eberardo | September 29th, 2006 at 10:52 am

Hello folks,

This is a very interesting iniative. It is always good to let people share its ideas. Congratulations!

Although the blogs area good way for feedback, I miss a place for feedback for the whole Yahoo! system…

Thanks

Silvio Eberardo, Petrópolis, Brazil

navin | September 29th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

I cant wait either, oh this is gonna be fun! Thank you Yahoo!

tty | September 15th, 2007 at 11:34 am

All you have to do to find the exploits is to look at the source code and maybe run it through a neat little program called Fortify. Apparently, Yahoo! doesn’t find that necessary and this is one of the reasons I’ve moved on to better services after 7 years. What would be nice to see is Yahoo! open up the system a bit more and allow developers to add to the server code (and publish those extensions and let users =choose if they want to use them), OR Yahoo! should tighten things up a bit and start publishing the API for almost everything they offer. Yahoo! dropped the ball in 2003-04 and it seems they are trying to pick it back up. Good luck with that. I’ve migrated to teamspeak and other text messaging systems.

The real evidence of this is Y!M for the Mac. How long has this OS been out and Y! released a fully (ok not really, but getting there) capable msgr for Mac when? Getting the Mac Messenger up to par should not have taken as long as it has. I wonder if this past behavior is an indication of how long Vista users will wait for the Y!M Vista version. I know quite a few people who will not wait 5 years as Mac users have.

So, to bring this back on topic after taking a rabbit trail, I’d like to sum up by saying this - You want to open up the Yahoo! systems for a Hackfest? Why don’t you look at those who show up and offer them jobs? It seems Yahoo! needs to look at new ways to meet the needs of its users, and I hope this is one of those “new” ways.

navneet | September 21st, 2007 at 5:10 am

hey yo tell me when its here YOYO DUDES