Karmona Pragmatic Blog

Yahoo have released the Y!OS (Yahoo Open Strategy) 1.0 platform.

This is a cool set of simple APIs that can give you access to everything you ever wanted in Y! but was afraid to ask for…

Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP)
// The Yahoo Social Platform is a set of RESTful APIs for Profiles, Connections, Updates, Contacts and Status.

Yahoo! Query Language (YQL)
// The Yahoo Query Language is a web service that functions much like SQL (see example below)

OAuth Authentication
// OAuth is the authentication and authorization standard Yahoo has decided to use when giving third parties access to Yahoo user data.

Yahoo! Applications Platform (YAP)
// Currently very limited and in a restricted sandbox.

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Example: How to use YQL APIs to access MyBlogLog profiles?

Simply ask for all the community members of MyBlogLog community with this YQL:

select * from mybloglog.members.find where community_id in (select id from mybloglog.community.find where name=”Karmona Pragmatic Blog”)

And once you have the IDs you can ask for my personal profile by:

select * from mybloglog.member where member_id =”2008070609482910″

Well… together with the existing BOSS API, this set of APIs is a powerful enablers to the Y! development network and I am sure some cool stuff are going to emerge from this innovative move…

Amazing!!!

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* You can have more YQL experiments using the YQL Console

** Boss Hack Day is coming to Tel-Aviv | November 6, 2008 @ Feature (!!!)

With the recent Russian spam attack on my business inbox, I have found out three interesting facts:

First, I really “prefer” my spam in English / Hebrew.
Second, Mr. Gates didn’t keep his promise* (what???) to a world without spam…
Third, Spam isn’t personal, everybody have it and Symantec have some nice monthly statistics** about it so we could all feel normal back again.

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Spam highlights from last two reports (8-9/2008)

- More than 80% of our emails are spam!

- Top spam “stories”

• Breaking News…McCain Chooses Paris Hilton as Running Mate
• Download IE7 … the Latest Version (I know someone who tried it :)
• Malware + Spam + Phishing = The Trifecta of Threats to Financial Institutions (I got a lot of these…)
• Olympic-Themed Spam Continued in August 2008
• Spammers’ Bullseye: Obama, McCain and the Olympic Games
• World War III Spam Hoax (I must admit, this one is really innovative :)
• Phishing Email Targets Microsoft POP3 User Data
• Bilingual Spam Messages Emerge

- Spam categories

• Internet 27% (was 18% in June)
• Products 20%
• Financial 17%
• Health 17%
• Scams 7%
• Leisure 4%
• Fraud 4%
• Adult 4%

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* “Two years from now, spam will be solved” (Bill Gates, DAVOS – Switzerland; Jan. 2004)
** Each month Symantec publishes its State-of-the-Spam-Report highlighting major spam events or trends observed during the previous month.

Technorati have finally started to release the “state of the blogosphere” report.

I must admit I was really waiting for this shitty report and I hate the fact that I need to see this reports in shards (will be released in five consecutive daily segments) but it was worth waiting until now.

2008 Blogosphere statistics includes:

• 133 million blogs (indexed by Technorati since 2002) was 70 million last year… (The State of the Live Web, April 2007)
• 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days
• 1.5 million blogs posted in the last 7 days (did you? ;-)
• 900,000 Blog posts in 24 hours = ~10 Blog posts per sec. (!!!) – Technorati claims that spam filtering have reduced the numbers they published last year (1.4 million blog posts per day)
• 66% of bloggers are male…
• 63% are ages 25 to 44
• 79% personal blogs
• 59% have been blogging for more than two years.
• 44% are parents
• … and with the mean annual revenue of $6K blogs are also claimed to be profitable (a.k.a. not mine)

WOW (!!!)

We have launched the Delver alpha an hour ago…
F5 on the monitors and statistics, geeee what a rush!!!

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/delver_launches_social_search.php#more

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/delvers-social-graph-search-engine-now-open-to-all/

http://mashable.com/2008/07/15/delver-alpha/

http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/15/delver-opens-social-powered-search-to-the-public/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9991378-2.html?tag=blog.1

http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/3975

…

Dunbar’s number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships.
In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates* to predict a social group size for humans and using a “simple” regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human “mean group size” of 150 (with 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).

Dunbar’s Friends is my definition (and trademark ;-) to those few “real”, trusted and known people in your huge** online social network***.

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* Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, non-human primates have to maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through grooming (and not “poking” as you might be expecting :-). The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain.

** Did you know that Robert Scoble is following 21,060 people in Twitter, 2,992 in FriendFeed and only 71 “lousy” friends in Flickr…

*** Social Network for Dummies – Lee and Sachi LeFever (a.k.a. the CommonCraft‘s family :) have created a wonderful video explaining social network in plain English.