Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry - wow. Watching things grow sloooowly for a long time, and then it finally seems like things are picking up… very exciting.
Update: link is The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem
Official Google Maps API Blog: Microformats in Google Maps - they could do a lot more, but it’s a good start.
I’ve been fairly busy at Microsoft, working, and hanging out with other interns and so I’m way behind on blogging about OpenSearch.
Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 and Firefox Bon Echo are out, both with some degree of OpenSearch support. Both support autodiscovery of Description files. IE7 (not sure about Firefox) supports search results in OpenSearch Response (RSS/Atom) as well as HTML. IE7 (and I suspect Firefox) do not support extended search parameters (those beyond searchTerms, startPage, etc.), but that’s to be expected at this stage.
Firefox support is a little odd, in that they also support some odd pseudoOpenSearch format. So please, developers, use real OpenSearch, it’ll work equally well in all readers, not just Firefox.
Firefox’s beta also has support for “search suggestions” when using Google or Yahoo. DeWitt has shown how (see draft document) these suggestions can be implemented in a way that is completely compatible with OpenSearch, without changing the existing format (JSON) at all. And it also opens the door to allowing suggestions themselves in OpenSearch; the Query element is ideal for this purpose.
From a webmaster perspective, the OpenSearch referrer extension (draft) is really great, allowing search sites to see where their searches are coming from. I’ve wanted this for a while, and it’s great to see it happening.
Perhaps more interesting than any of this is moving forward on adding structured data into OpenSearch, and DeWitt’s draft OpenSearch and Microformats is a great step in that direction. Personally I like data to be in XML more directly (rather than embedding it within atom:content, for example), but hopefully that approach can work in tandem, still using microformats. I’ll be looking into it, as I unofficially advise my university on how to create an API for their people search. Others have been looking at this too.
These are just some of the major happenings in OpenSearch. There are a variety of new software libraries, such as in Java and Ruby. An increasing number of organizations are basing their APIs and other things on OpenSearch. A9.com’s listing of OpenSearch providers is now well over 300. It’s hard to believe how far OpenSearch has come and how far it looks like it may go.
Tantek’s Thoughts - Building Things - I have no idea what Tantek has been working on, but congratulations on the imminent launch and being so dedicated to something. I can’t wait to see it.
Via Marc Canter, I learn that AOL is creating YAPP (yet another personal portal), in the DHTML/AJAX style. That’s by no means a bad thing, though.
So now we have all the major players with a personalizable home page: Yahoo!, Google, MSN (Windows Live), and AOL (okay, so theirs is alpha). 3/4 of those are ‘all cool and ajax-y,’ Yahoo! being the odd one out. Yahoo!’s is the oldest, and I’d be quite surprised if they weren’t planning a new version with a richer interface.
In the ajax-y arena, there are several which are just as good or better than the major players: Netvibes, Protopage, eskobo, and several others.
Looking at another facet, 3 of those major players, and none of the others that I’m aware of, allow third-party modules. I haven’t looked at Microsoft’s, but I did look at Google’s last month in Why is the Google Homepage API not HTML?. Surprise, surprise, AOL’s announcement today is that their API is a microformat (HTML).
Aside from the AJAX, does this remind anyone else of 1999? I’d accuse some of copying from others, but… well that’s life.
Update January 20: Yahoo!’s is now all ajaxy, although it doesn’t seem quite as well done as some of the others. No third-party modules yet, though.