Category: interview

The Yahoo! Mail Web Service screencasts

The Yahoo! Mail team rolled out a groundbreaking service today — the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. As Chad says in the announcement:

“With the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, you can connect to the core mail platform to perform typical mailbox tasks for premium users such as list messages and folders, and compose and send messages (you can also build mail preview tools for free users with limited Web Service functionality). In other words, developers outside of Yahoo! can now build mail tools or applications on the same infrastructure we use to build the highly-scaled Yahoo! Mail service that serves nearly 250 million Yahoo! Mail users today.”

Very cool!

Jeremy Zawodny and I spent some time both with lead engineer Ryan Kennedy and then a Hack Day hacker Leah Culver to screencast the tools they each built using the Yahoo! Mail Web Service (Mail Search and Flickr Postcard). Jeremy asked the hard questions while I recorded and produced the video. You can see them both below.

With this screencast we decided to also offer downloadable versions in addition to the web-ready and shareable Yahoo! Video versions. We debated a bit about what downloadable format to offer and decided the ipod-friendly M4V was the best choice. The best solution is probably to offer all formats and posts on all the video sharing sites, but we didn’t have time for that.

Here is the full download for Ryan’s demo, and here is Leah’s.

And here they are embedded:

Any experience you have or thoughts on how we should share these types of videos would be welcome.

Screencasting with Yahoo! partners

An exciting part of my job is the exposure I get to startups that are doing new and interesting things. Last week, for example, Jeremy Zawodny and I sat with the Renkoo team while they walked through all the ways they are using Yahoo! technologies in their product.

We captured what was happening on screen and recorded the conversation using Camtasia. Then I edited it into 2 parts: the first is more of a demo and the second is a discussion of the technologies. I saved it as a video file, uploaded it to Yahoo! Video and finally posted it to the YDN blog this morning.

It’s nice co-marketing for us both. Yahoo! gets to show off how powerful its services can be, and Renkoo gets a nice platform through YDN to demonstrate the clever things they’ve done to a broad audience of peers.

Fun stuff.

You can watch the first part of the interview here.