(Mountain View) – Laaker.com is now leveraging URL-shortening links for its 3rd-party service promotional links (i.e. links that point back to Laaker.com posts) as well as to other items of Micah Laaker’s interest.
At the time of this publication, m13.me links will now redirect to Laaker’s links of choice.
“From whence the m13.me domain came, you [...]

Seeing as how 2010 will be here in days, I figured I’d recap some of my favorite things from 2009. (In this case, as is most often the case for me, “things” will refer to Web and electronics products.)
Granted, they’re no equivalent to Robert Goulet’s list, but they should still provide a good break from [...]

Several weeks ago, Carrie shared a story with me about making Christmas tree ornaments with your kids. For some reason, the first ornament subject matter that popped into my mind for such a project was Hellboy.
For those unfamiliar, Hellboy is the (clearly) fictional spawn of the devil, summoned to Earth by an unholy alliance [...]

I just posted a recap of the PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, walking through a couple highlights of the event. PayPal’s new APIs offer more means of handling transactions within an Application. It will be interesting to see what types of products begin to emerge using these new tools.

(Mountain View) –
Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience, a new book on design patterns for social software by current colleague Christian Crumlish and former manager Erin Malone, features a riff on Micah Laaker’s recent “Evaluating Openness” missive.
Headlining for Chapter 17 (“Open for Business”), Laaker’s “What does it mean [...]

Nearly 5 years ago, I joined Yahoo! to work on its “Front Doors” effort: a re-imagining of its starting points (i.e. Yahoo.com, Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Toolbar). My work inside since has woven through several products and teams, but there is a consistent theme: working on products and platforms that expand the capabilities [...]

At a recent Yahoo! Internal Hack Day, Mac developer powerhouse Karl Adam demonstrated an App he dubbed “Campus.” For any Yahoo! employee that installs it, one can locate a conference room by name or location in the campus’ multi-storied halls.
The App’s visual representation of the buildings are handled by beautifully-rendered illustrations (by Kalani Kordus) [...]

This past week (just in time to beat WWDC), my team released code to integrate Yahoo!’s Social Platform APIs into your Mac OS X and iPhone applications. Announced on the YDN blog and pushed to our GitHub account, the code gives any developer access to the following:

Read the profile of your user (photo, nickname, real [...]

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting “Designing Your Product as a Platform” for BayCHI’s monthly program at Xerox PARC alongside Dan Brodnitz (who presented “20 Conversations About Creativity”).
In the talk, I spoke about what it meant to be “Open.” The word “Open” is pretty packed with meaning, and I rarely find two [...]

(Mountain View) – Christian Crumlish, Yahoo! Pattern Librarian and all-around talented design thinker, recently announced what the Bay Area had long been hoping for: Micah Laaker and Dan Brodnitz are confirmed to present at this April’s BayCHI program.
Confirmed for Tuesday, April 14, 7:30pm, Laaker is set to give the first of two talks entitled “Designing [...]

In Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix),” featured artist Jay-Z drops a couple of lines that have bothered me for the past 4 years:
Bleek could be one hit away his whole career
As long as I’m alive, he’s a millionaire
And even if I die, he’s in my will somewhere
So he can just kick back [...]

I rarely bring up family issues here as I often assume they’d rather not be sullied by association. However, my parents recently received an award which I believe is worth mentioning.
For those that don’t know, my dad is a Lutheran minister in Omaha, Nebraska (“Hometown of Heroes,” as I’m known to call it). As far [...]

Somehow, I managed to open a debate recently with esteemed colleague and Flash/Flex wünderkind Zach Graves about which was the better flash memory card for digital cameras: the Eye-fi Explore 2GB card (mine) or the Kingston one-trick-pony 8GB card (Zach’s).
I argued (very convincingly) that uploading photos and geotagging them were for suckers. They [...]

Chances are, when you’re out and about surfing the Web, you’re bumping into semantically-enhanced content.* In some cases, you see the benefits; in others, your experience doesn’t change. This fact is one of the great side effects of the Semantic Web movement: if you participate in enhancing your content, none of your users suffer, and [...]

(Mountain View, CA) – Micah Laaker’s photographic enterprises are now featured in “Stockton: Renewed, Revitalized, Redefined“, a hardcover coffee table book illustrating the history and revivification of Stockton, California.
The book features two of Laaker’s photographs from a recent visit to Stockton:
Bank of Stockton building
Fox Theater Marquee
These two photographs by Laaker were discovered on Flickr by [...]