Last October, Yahoo! held an Open Hack Day where we brought in developers and designers in the Bay Area to work on whatever they wanted to, and invited them to utilize Yahoo! APIs to make cool hacks … and that’s what people did. From Flickr Postcard mailers to a purse cam that sent periodic, geotagged photos to Flickr, there was a lot of great stuff that came out. And of course, there was Beck, the surprise performer.

This June, Yahoo!, in conjunction with BBC (“the Beeb”), are hosting a similar event but this time in the UK. A few of you UK readers probably already heard about this but if you haven’t, you should definitely sign up.

And yes, there will be a band playing. Not that you’re motivated by such trivialities.

One thing they did really well was hire for a specific culture. They did this so well, in fact, that it was practically a cult. They displayed many traits that a cult would. Cults try to insulate you from the outside world. Trilogy accomplished this by hiring in spurts, bringing in 150 new grads into “Trilogy University” or TU, a 3 month intensive internal training program. Cults worship a single leader or ideal to a fault. Trilogy idolized “Joe”, the CEO and founder Joe Liemandt. Cults expose new recruits to “thought leaders” of the cult – people who speak and preach the ideals of the cult. Trilogy University classes were grouped into “sections” of 30 people, each section had two section leads that were hand picked from the company to lead and mold the new grads into the Trilogy culture.

The other thing they did well was hire really talented people that tended to make me feel like the dumbest person in the room.

As scary as this may sound, there’s something about the camaraderie and the sheer caliber of people they managed to pull in that made it an interesting and fun place to work. They did a lot of things wrong with that same culture and homogeneity but at least they knew how to have fun and get stuff done at the same time.

This video from Connected Ventures, the people behind CollegeHumor, Vimeo, Busted Tees and many other projects, reminds me of such a culture. One that I’m hoping Brickhouse will be able to foster.

• Pasha Sadri: the man with the idea, who also came up with Yahoo! Trip Planner is a brilliant thinker and draws great caricatures to boot.
• Edward Ho: all round ninja doing both front end and back end as well as the top of Mario Kart DS
• Jonathan Trevor: Whom I’ve told numerous people is the guy who codes faster than I can design (he’s responsible for the editor)
• Daniel Raffel: The guy who gets all the things out of the way and fills in every crack and deals with the multitude of minute details we would otherwise forget.

I joined in late November and had the opportunity to overhaul the visuals and a fair amount of the interaction on the site in a short time although this past week my eyes have been bleeding from css and php much more than Photoshop. On the home stretch, we got crucial helping hands from Maciej Ceglowski and Paul Hammond.

Everyone’s pimping our sponsors, and really for good reason because they made it possible to do a project like this in the unique environment that we had as fast as we did. So cheers to Caterina and Bradley!

Finally, some more mentions now from Jeremy, TechCrunch, GigaOm (thanks Jackson!) and hell, just look at Leonard’s Pipe for Pipes Buzz.

Oh, and I’ve got my Player News for NHL Player Pipe set up (good for fantasy sports).

Although live, we are nowhere near done. The number of ideas we have for taking this forward are countless but we want to get the ideas from everyone else, too. Don’t be shy about using the feedback link. We do read that stuff. I’ll hopefully write more about what I think is cool about it as it can take some explaining but in the mean time, some other people have been giving us some mighty high praise.

• Tim O’Reilly
• Anil Dash
• Nick Bradbury
• Niall Kennedy

Time to make my Fantasy Hockey Roster News pipe now…

Three things happened in quick succession this past week:

• Flickr limited number of tags to 75 and number of contacts to 3,000
• They also announced a date when the users who aren’t using Yahoo! accounts would have to merge their accounts with a Yahoo! ID
• Yahoo! launched a branded Wii site which includes a Flickr stream of all photos tagged Wii.

And what a reaction there was. People in an uproar over so many things it’s hard to enumerate. But as someone who is an old skooler and am inside Yahoo!, I really gotta say a few things to the whiners:

• Flickr has the best interest of the users in mind but it can’t make every last individual happy. Seriously, I know a lot of the people in there and they give a shit. You on the other hand, don’t seem to care enough to give the benefit of the doubt any time something doesn’t go EXACTLY your way.
• Get a grip. There is no conspiracy. You guys have talked about the doom and gloom and how Flickr was going to suck since the acquisition TWO YEARS AGO and guess what? It just kept getting better. Geo-tagging, guest passes, machine tags, printing of photos, half priced subscription … what the heck do you need as proof that Flickr is doing fine while in Yahoo!?
• Grow up. Tag bombing the Wii site by putting up “Yahoo! is Poo” images? Yahoo!, and many many many other sites, have been using tag streams of Flickr photos well before the Wii branded site. Sorry you were too clueless to notice that and it’s not because of Yahoo!’s Terms of Service vs. Flickr’s. Remember that whole Web 2.0 thing you guys love to be a part of? This is what it’s about. They’re public photos with creative commons license.
• There’s no point in lying about technological challenges. Flickr has some really smart people working on that plumbing and hey, when you build for millions of users and more photos than just about every other photo site out there, with real time ties in relationships, THEN say, “unlimited contacts should be easy.” Scalability is a hard problem. I don’t presume to know how you do your job.
• Does anyone actually know/remember 19,000 people? That’s not social networking. That’s playing MySpace Pokemon.
• Have they actually given you a reason to distrust them? Aside from “well I hate all things Yahoo!” which is completely irrational and devoid of logic, I mean. Yes, few of us are blind to the fact that Yahoo! has done some pretty crappy things with Geocities and numerous other things and we all know there’s a reputation issue but there aren’t many people around now that were around 5+ years ago. Leaving without even seeing it through seems kind of premature.
• Flickr has an API for you to go elsewhere. If that’s not a sign of caring about your data, I don’t know what is.
• Yahoo!’s sign in sucks. The namespace is polluted and it’s hard to get a good ID. The registration sucks. We know these things. We’re working on it. Having said that, the Yahoo! ID you use isn’t exposed on Flickr so having an unpretty name is actually not that relevant.
• Oh and, Thomas Hawk. Love your photos. Hate the way you continually troll Flickr forums while running a clone with a bad name (were two o’s and no e taken?) and an interface so similar it took me awhile to realize I wasn’t in Flickr.

There’s no question that there are problems with Yahoo! and a lot of the products. Flickr is not one of them and that hasn’t changed just because your sign-in is different. If you old skoolers find something better, let me know. I’m gonna bet you don’t.

I was dead set on working on TransitSF, the hack I worked on with Sean and Jane a year ago at the first hack day. It lets you enter two points in San Francisco and using Yahoo! Maps and 511.org’s Tripplanner, tells you what public transit to take. But it needs a lot of work.

Just as I was getting ready to start, though, we got a Nintendo Wii set up 5 feet from me. Let’s just say productivity was at an all time low. So instead, I decided to work on a hack that used the Nintendo Wii remote (or Wiimote). By the time of hack day, only a week after release, there were already a number of hacks out there as well as some protocols and drivers. For the PC, there was GlovePIE.

So I did a few basic things. First, I hooked up the d-pad controllers to the cursor keys, then some other keyboard mappings. Essentially, this made for the perfect presentation remote (it was bluetooth connected so the range was good as well). But what about the motion? That’s the cool part of the remote after all.

Well it turned out that measuring exact positioning of the Wiimote was difficult but measuring that there is movement, especially along the Y-axis, was not so difficult. So I made the ultimate presentation tool. Whenever your demo or presentation starts going badly or somebody asks you a hard question, just start waving your hands as you “ummm” and “ahhhh” and point out how that’s a “very interesting point”.

Then, using this hand tool from Microsoft, we get…a fake blue screen of death. Sorry, but we’re experiencing some technical errors

[GlovePIE file] [Fake Bluescreen] (you’ll have to change the filename to point it to wherever you put the .scr file)

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s in Flash which will seem rather controversial. I know when I first saw it I asked a ton of questions:

__what about the back button?__ it works

__what about permalink?__ it auto updates the address bar. heck you don’t even need to click on “permalink” or whatever it is google uses

__why not ajax?__ why ajax? the idea isn’t that ajax itself is better, it’s that rich interaction in browsers is becoming more plausible with more standardized browsers.

__what about adoption rate of flash?__ depends who and what you ask for the stats really. it’s approximately equal to if not greater than for browsers that can support the level of ajax required to do google maps.

There’s a ton of other things I can’t really talk about regarding reasons but you shall see … To be 10000% clear – I’m a designer on the team but I work on other secret stuff. I’m just really happy this is finally out there for my friends to play with.

Also, we DO have an AJAX version for API developers to play with. I personally like the (somewhat buggy) events browser.

Today, we launched Best Of Yahoo! which is like the typical annual “best of” you see in local magazines (or in Citysearch for that matter). Sadly, there seems to be a lack of reasonable nominations when I checked out the Austin ones but hey, go add your favourite ice cream place, for example (*cough Amy’s cough*) and apparently, you can win a car.

You can. I can’t. Doh!

Getting here meant another adventure through INS to get my TN-1 visa which I naturally dreaded given previous experiences. Since I so readily write about the horrid experiences, I thought it only fair that I mention that this time, it could not have possibly gone more smoothly. The officer basically nodded, looked at the paperwork, cracked a joke here and there, and stamped my visa. He was much more knowledgeable than most I’ve met in the past, knowing enough to stamp “Multiple Entry”, which usually I have to ask for, and reminding me to keep that and not let uninformed travel agents take it away (as they are prone to do).

The corporate housing is pretty sweet, but sadly, I will not be in anything quite as fancy when I find a place in the city so I’m trying not to get spoilt on it.

Back to the first day … obviously, I can’t talk much about it but it was a full day of orientation with some excellent information. I got my recognition of being “official” which I shall describe as “could suck more” for something that will represent my existence for the rest of my career here.

Alas, no computers nor desk. In fact, because of the suddenness of the visa papers coming through, everything was set up rather quickly and there wasn’t any opportunity to properly notify HR of my impending arrival.

“Welcome to Yahoo. You are …”

“Kevin Cheng”

“Ya … Who?”