Yahoo! Design Pattern Library Update

Design patterns describes optimal solutions to the common types of problems web developers and designers come across in specific contexts as they build applications and user interfaces. Today, theYahoo! Design Pattern Library relaunched with ten new patterns, three new stencil kits, and tons of useful links and resources.

We've updated the navigation, made cleaner URLs for easier bookmarking, integrated forums where you can participate in pattern development, and added Buzz and Delicious links for each pattern.

Learn more about design patterns and how they can help you work smarter and faster.

New Yahoo! Go for TV Beta

Check out the new version Yahoo! Go for TV Beta. View your personal Flickr photostreams. Get movie recommendations. Search for video clips. And our new version is compatible with all of the most popular tuner cards.

YQL(Yahoo! Query Language)

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. With YQL, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint.
Yahoo! and other websites across the Internet make much of their structured data available to developers, primarily through Web services. To access and query these services, developers traditionally endure the pain of locating the right URLs and documentation to access and query each Web service.
With YQL, developers can access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn how to call different APIs.

for more info visit www.developer.yahoo.com/yql

Yahoo to feed its own stock ticker service

Yahoo on Sunday said it has stopped using stock ticker information from British financial-news powerhouse Reuters and will instead use direct feeds from major U.S. exchanges on its financial Web site.
The alteration of Yahoo's longstanding relationship with Reuters will not affect the presence of Reuters' news headlines throughout Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News. Instead, Yahoo will use its direct links into the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq, the American Stock Exchange, and so on, to launch its own service called "Quotes from Yahoo Finance," which it plans to license to outside Web sites.
"This is just about our taking control of the data business ourselves and extending that to other platforms," said Craig Forman, Yahoo's vice president of information and finance.
Besides stock quotes, the new service also will provide charts and analytical tools. Forman added that the company signed up Forbes.com as a customer to provide a mutual-fund charting feature.
Forman declined to disclose licensing terms.
Reuters has been a presence on Yahoo for many years and remains a content partner of the Web portal. But the British news service has been scaling back the amount of information and content it distributes in hopes of bolstering its Web site and its business of selling proprietary financial systems.
Yahoo has made moves over the past few years to limit its dependency on Reuters, striking deals with major news organizations such as the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to provide headlines throughout Yahoo's general and financial news sections.
The decision to license its ticker service to outside companies is not surprising, given that Yahoo recently released a test version of its own desktop stock ticker service.

Yahoo! Customer Service Phone Number

They should have an award to see who can find a place on the Yahoo website for the customer service telephone number in the least amount of time. I have personally spent at least an hour of my own time looking for it, and I have not been able to do it. So, this is where the power of the internet can really pay off. We have heard from hundreds of people who have shared the same frustration we have when trying to find the Yahoo customer service number since we posted this page. So, we decided to add a forum so that people can share information and stories about Yahoo customer service and the ever elusive phone number. Our new Yahoo customer service forums are a place for you to talk to other people who may be able to help....when Yahoo! doesn't seem to want to.

My own frustration came when I could not get a hold of a real person to cancel an old Yahoo Store account. It had been some time and I had forgotten the store name that Yahoo was using. Needless to say, I became a bit angry. I called the credit card company to cancel the charges as I could not get into the customer service queue without the store name. It was really fun. Hopefully, we can help each other to avoid this frustration in the future .

Yahoo Net service comes to Samsung TVs

Yahoo technology to bring Internet services to TVs has fledged from the demonstration realm to become available in an actual product, Samsung TVs.

Yahoo calls the technology TV Widgets, but Samsung is branding it as Internet@TV. It provides access to a handful of Yahoo services--news, stock quotes, Flickr photos, weather--as well as the Twitter microblogging service, sports scores, eBay shopping, and CBS content. (CBS is owner of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.)

People tap into the services through applications called TV widgets that can be overlaid across the bottom or left of the screen; there's also a gallery that lets people download new widgets. A remote control is used to operate the service.

Samsung's Web site indicates the feature is available on four LED TVs that definitely won't be found in the bargain basement. They are the 55-inch, $3,800 UN55B7100 and UN55B7000 models and the 46-inch, $3,000 UN46B7100 and UN46B7000.

Yahoo and Intel jointly brought the TV Widgets technology to market, with a splashy debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. However, Yahoo plans to make TV Widgets available on TVs that don't use Intel processors, too.

Yahoo plans to offer advertising through the technology, too, though not initially. Advertisements don't have to go through Yahoo, however.

The technology is "coming soon" to TVs from Vizio, Sony, and LG Electronics, Yahoo said on its Web site.

Yahoo, perhaps overoptimistically, believes the technology will eliminate contention over who's the TV boss. "No more arguing over the remote, as everyone gets to enjoy what they want at the same time! You can check out the latest news from the New York Times, while other family members are still enjoying the TV show," the company asserts.

What are Mashups?

Mashups take data and content from one application and merge them with another, often to a startlingly cool effect. Pictures become more lively when matched with their geographic context. Many searches are far more valuable in a local context. Mashups typically allow us a different view of the data, layering one source on top of another via use of simple web technologies like XML and REST.

Yahoo! APIs Power Serious Applications Too

Web services aren't all fun and games. Yahoo!'s APIs let developers tap into Yahoo!'s world class data and infrastructure to help them power their business. Yahoo! APIs and Web Services are governed by the relevant Terms of Use and Usage Policy. While we make a limited amount of queries available for small-volume applications, we are also interested in working with companies to help them gain an edge by building on top of Yahoo! as a platform, applications that often require greater query volumes. See our FAQ for more info on usage. Register your application with us to apply for additional queries and be notified of system status. A great example is the Vertical Search Application from Rollyo.

Mmm… Developer Candy: Developer Centers, Patterns and More!

Would you like to be multilingual? Our Developer Centers are a great place to get started with a new language. They cover the basics on how to make Web service calls, parse XML and more. JavaScript, PHP and Python are just the beginning! A huge helper for writing dynamic web pages is the Yahoo! User Interface Library. It is a set of utilities and controls written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques. Another great resource is our Pattern Library, which explains the best solutions for reoccuring problems in creating a website, like Autocomplete or Breadcrumbs.