Since joining Graphicly, Laaker has led the charge begin incorporating its first wave of social features in the product’s Web app, launch its Android application, release a rudimentary distributable Web widget, update its iPad application, and define the company’s product roadmap.

“For anyone that has known me since I was very young (or has ever looked at my gift wish list or library record), joining forces with Graphicly is a perfect match,” said Laaker from his new Palo Alto working location. “I have loved comics since I was very young, continue to collect and debate the nuances of story and art with anyone who shows the slightest willingness to listen, and have spent my past 6 professional years working on platforms to help producers get their content/experiences in front of wider audiences (and means for users to socialize them).”

Most recently leading product management, user experience, marketing, and partner relations for Yahoo!’s developer platforms (which make Yahoo! products and services available to 3rd-party developers and publishers), Laaker helped lead Yahoo!’s game partnership deal with Zynga while continuing to push for primary access to Yahoo!’s APIs through YQL.

Originally envisioning his future as the industry’s star comic penciller, Laaker moved into design and product development where he was able to stay close to the visual storytelling media he’d always aspired towards. He led the design teams for the launch of comic legend Stan Lee’s foray into the online world, the Flash-based animated music video for MF Doom, the relaunch of media brand Def Jam Recording’s label site, and the original Flash-based, animated trivia game for the Disney Channel’s Vault Disney. Additionally, he continued his illustration work via board game design and e-cards for Barnes & Noble, among personal projects.

Partnering with the only Micah who has more Twitter followers (sadly by a factor of 10), Laaker joins a strong core team based in Boulder, CO, while continuing to work with a growing West Coast operation in AOL’s Palo Alto incubator lab space.

But, unlike blogging or even some advanced message boards, these activity streams hide the results of such posts from the very people who publish them. How many other people click on a link that you share? How many people even saw your activity stream post? If you look at the interfaces for these streams, you’d assume people didn’t care about whether other people care about their posts. The absence of visible analytics per post, however, belie the desire of people to know the impact of their effort.

Google Analytics’ self-service, free solution (among many others) for any Web page quickly demonstrated how import content publishers considered the performance of their publishing. And, already, the rise of URL shortening-and-tracking services such bit.ly and awe.sm demonstrate that those who actively publish content through these streams want to know how their content performs with services like Twitter and Facebook.

Think such analytics aren’t popular with the mainstream and only useful for power users? Remember Web counters? There remain hundreds (possibly thousands, if you have the time to tally up all the true solutions from the 1.2 billion results for “web counters”) of easy-to-integrate tools for users to both track visitors and show others how meaningful are their contributions to the Web. One needn’t look at nerd technology for this validation, either. Before you tell a joke, do you think about the number of laughs you got from your last re-telling of the entertaining tale? We are a social people, and the striving for validation that comes from our peers’ responses to our actions have long governed most folks’ actions at nearly every level of our development.

But, back to nerd technology… Facebook has long had a “Like” button underneath each item in their news feed, and Twitter has also long-served a “favorite this tweet” button (i.e. the star icon) next to each of its tweets. (Additionally, Twitter offers the “Retweet” functionality, which exposes a visible counter of others’ retweets.) These indicators are great means of determining our peers’ positive responses to each micro-publication, but they do not capture the true value behind each of these micro-publication: the number of clicks a link generates divided by the number of times it has been displayed to other people. And, not only is the publisher of the link robbed of this information, so to is her audience.

So, why would exposing these numbers and ratios be valuable to people and publishers?

On a page with 10 links from 10 different people, which should I click on? Obviously, the subject matter matters as does the publisher (if they’re somehow connected to me). But if I don’t know the publisher, and the subject matter is all the same, which link should I check out? Some people, of course, will want to follow the road least travelled; most, however, would trust the one with the most traffic (as the preceding people voted for the best link with their clicks).

From a publisher’s standpoint, knowing what types of content my readers click on (and what content they see but don’t bother clicking through to) helps me tune what I deliver to my audience. Even as a publisher of just my life’s activities (i.e. what I generally post on Facebook), if I know no one clicks on my activities posted from games, I might think twice before connecting Facebook and the next game I install; connecting such a game would just produce more chaff, which will dilute the value of all my posts in my readers’ eyes.

So, assuming such analytics should be exposed, what would these activity streams look like if they began surfacing such statistics? Twitter’s Retweet exposure (and contact card overlay) offers a glimpse:

In this vein, links could have a hover state (akin to the Twitter user hover card) where link click-throughs can be displayed (as well as the target of an URL, if the URL displayed is that of an URL shortener).

Publishers, of course, might also receive more details than those displayed for all people. Facebook Pages similarly provides a sneak peek at this direction (where the highlighted details in the screenshot below are displayed only to the Page’s publisher):

By exposing statistics to both all people and the publishers themselves, the hosts of these activity streams can provide a more meaningful, measurable and desirable experience to all users. And, in doing so, help us find the validation we look for in nearly all our daily activities.

This is big. 80 million users play Farmville, on average, a month on Facebook. 28M for Poker. 23M for Mafia Wars. These users bring their friends and family along to build and tend virtual farms, whack mob bosses, and perfect their poker face. Zynga and Yahoo! both will actively promote their latest games on Yahoo!’s canvases, and Yahoo! in turn will build extensive hooks for all developers (ALL developers) to re-engage their users post-install.

Additionally, we’ll be working to expose new engagement channels to drive repeat usage of Apps in a way Yahoo! never did before: navigational links to a user’s favorite Apps and persistent requests on every page of our network. New places to play Zynga (and other) games. A far richer social graph than users have today.

My team, and the larger Yahoo! family, have been and continue to work around the clock to make lots of new opportunities open up for all 3rd-party developers. You can read more on my YDN post about the developer-facing components, as well as the TechCrunch scoop on the deal. It’s exciting to be able to share the news.

I intentionally list developers first, as I strongly believe developer-friendly products encourage significant innovation on top of Web products… which, in turn, greatly benefit everyone else (who get features and support for niches that no product could conceivably support on its own).

I am happy to announce, after significant time and effort from a great crew of present (and past) talent at Yahoo!, we now support Apps built by 3rd-party developers (i.e. people who don’t work for Yahoo!) on the Yahoo! Homepage. What this means is you can now add just about any type of content and functionality to the Web’s most popular starting experience.

More than a dozen of these Apps can be found right now by clicking the “+ Add” link next to “My Favorites” on Yahoo.com. From managing your money with recently-acquired-by-Intuit Mint.com, to checking out the weekly ads for Target stores, to puzzle-solving games with Flood-It!: there is an App to suit your interests.

Disagree? Get started building one today… there’s no fees (although you can make money inside your App as you like), no complex SDK (write your code the way you prefer on your server), and no obtuse App Store approval process (instantly share your App with millions and/or promote it using Yahoo!’s in-product App galleries).

To do this, the Yahoo! Developer Network lets you:

• learn more about YAP (our App development platform),
• get up and building an App, and
• create/manage your Apps.

Let me know your experience with these Open Apps on Yahoo.com… I’m excited to see my team’s work see such a large online audience, but I’m also equally exciting about adding even more support and features for developers soon.

Update: TechCrunch has just covered the release of the Mint.com App (and others) on Yahoo.com.

• Read the profile of your user (photo, nickname, real name, age, sex, location, work and education history, and interests),
• Read your user’s list of friends/connections,
• Read/Write your user’s status message,
• Read your user’s list of Updates (i.e. their activities from Yahoo! and the rest of the Web),
• Write your user’s activities from inside your app into her Updates stream,
• Query, filter, and join any data from Yahoo! and other Web services via YQL, and
• Broker your user’s permission to access this information using OAuth.

What does all this mean? It’s simple. An app using this SDK can pull in my Yahoo! profile information, plot me and my friends on a map (grabbing the locations stored in our profiles), compare our listening preferences (grabbing our favorite music preferences), and broadcast my activity (i.e. “Micah just posted a new high score of 18,478 in Bejeweled 2“) which, in turn, drives my friends (and more) to your app.

You can learn more at YDN (as well as find all the documentation).

And, if you build anything interesting using the code, please let me know… we’re always interested in showcasing great developer-built solutions (using Yahoo! technology) on the YDN blog. Even better, come out and join in at the iPhone Dev Camp Yahoo! is hosting July 31 – August 2, 2009.

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 folks who agree on its definition. For instance, a colleague of mine raised hackles when he saw the term “Open” applied to BOSS, Yahoo!’s open search engine service because there was a for-pay tier of service (despite it allowing search functionality inside of other’s products, largely free). In his mind, “open” was associated with “free,” whereas for me, it was associated with flexibility and utility outside of its original location (i.e. inside Yahoo! Search).

Because of this, and many other similar conversations over the past 4 years, I wanted to provide a framework for how one can assess a product or platform’s “open-ness.” Below are the 13 facets of openness that I’ve been cataloging as a means to better describe this term. (They range on a scale starting on the technology side and ending on the side of the user’s experience.)

1. Open Source
   Free to use, decentralized, and (generally) highly reliable, this software movement seems to drive most folks’ definition of “open.”

2. Open Infrastructure
   Emerging as a new kind of openness, “cloud computing” has opened a pay-as-you-go, only-what-you-need approach to technology.

3. Open Architecture
   By defining a spec for how others can plug into your product, anyone can mod and extend your product.

4. Open Standards
   A community-powered, consensus-driven approach drives for a goal of interoperability, whether for software or hardware.

5. Open Ontology
   Add meaning to the Web by surrounding your data with semantic meaning (so that software can make meaningful connections).

6. Open Access
   By providing APIs, 3rd-party developers and partners can take your data/service into their products.

7. Open Canvas
   Your product can become a vehicle for 3rd-party content by opening portals into other products (while keeping users on yours).

8. Open Content
   The user becomes the editor by programming self-relevant content which comes to you when it’s ready.

9. Open Mic
   The product is populated entirely by users, not by you (a.k.a. the product team). Users own their content, and products support the making/discovering of content.

10. Open Forum
    Users form a rich web around content by contributing ancillary data, ratings, reviews, ranking, conversations and link submissions.

11. Open Door
    The user is welcomed/embraced as a product decision-maker in this corporate bizarro world.

12. Open Borders
    Settings and configurations become portable. Import/export is the requirement, and the user is not locked-in to a single product, instead having the ability to come and go as they please.

13. Open Identity
    The user is the owner of her identity and information, metering out bits as she finds appropriate.

With this list in mind, you can see the presentation in its entirety below:

In many ways, this list (and presentation) is an early draft, and I’d welcome additional thinking on the subject. How are others defining and planning for openness?

Update: YDN posted a recap of my talk alongside examples of each of the 13 facets of openness.

Confirmed for Tuesday, April 14, 7:30pm, Laaker is set to give the first of two talks entitled “Designing Your Product as a Platform.” The talk is billed as: “Learn how Yahoo! is designing its products to leverage third-party developers, embrace outside content, and weave its services into the larger web’s fabric, all as part of its “Open Strategy” efforts.” Laaker plans to walk through Yahoo!’s recent efforts to redesign and rebuild its products to be both more ‘open’ (to third-party developers) and ‘social’ (amongst its massive user base).

Co-headlining the event is Dan Brodnitz, creative cataloguer of the creative class, who will be presenting “20 Conversations About Creativity,” which explores his insightful Conversations about Creativity series. The talk will dive into the many interviews Brodnitz has conducted with “writers, musicians, visual artists, a clown, a choreographer, two cartoonists, a toy inventor, and a stand up comic.”

Shortly before I left the halls of Island Def Jam to come to Yahoo!, the company began promoting little-known Atlanta artist Lloyd on their Murder Inc. sub-label. After one spin, I smelled a stinker, and said so.

“No, no, no. Lloyd’s gonna be hot,” I heard.

Today, at a corporate office’s coffee bar in Silicon Valley, what did I see? A Lloyd “How We Do It” CD… offered not as a Lloyd CD, but rather (and rather mockingly at that) as a drink coaster.

It feels good being right every now and again.

Most interesting to me, however, has been their quiet rollout of MicroID support last week. ClaimID quickly posted, Fred Stutzman followed suit, and the MicroID blog alerted folks as well.

MicroID, for the uninitiated, is a snippet of code (which is made up a user’s email address and the URL of the current web page) which can be used by machines to verify the owner of the current web page. As a user, I find it incredibly annoying to tell the multitude of sites I use what other sites I use. (“You’re a computer,” I say. “Figure it out.”) As more sites roll out MicroIDs behind the scenes, pages/profiles I author (or am somehow responsible for, such as my YouTube Favorites links or my Amazon Wish List) could quickly be “sniffed out” by sites I already use.

Why would I want them to know what other pages/sites I use? I answered some of this in my interview upon joining YDN. But, quickly, it boils down to a decentralized and lightweight trust system that would allow the software behind any site at which I’m recognized to provide relevant content/recommendations. That, and I wouldn’t need to spend any time sharing all my other account usernames with a site I’m not even sure I want to continue using.

Anyway, MyBlogLog is following in the rich history of other major providers adding MicroID support: Digg, Plaxo, Last.fm, Wink, and others.

(Side note: As some may know, I had the good pleasure of working closely with the MyBlogLog team for the first two quarters of 2007. Aside from getting to getting to work on a new version of the Recent Readers widget and the all-new Profile widget (among migrating to the Yahoo! ID and the common Yahoo! profile representation), I got to work alongside some of the incredibly talented crew: Todd, John, Steve, Chris, Robyn, Ian and Eric.)

Additionally, Max’s plugin makes it easy to toggle between the production release and the more cutting-edge builds.

You can see an example of this plugin in the bottom-left corner of this page… just hover over the grey tab, and a pop-out bar will provide controls for playback of a series of MP3s I’ve hidden in this page’s code (courtesy of hip-hop mixtape master Mick Boogie).

We have all the official information up on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, as well as the official open Hack Day site.

And, as with last year’s event here in Sunnyvale, this will be free, open to (and expressly for) non-Yahoo! employees, and provide a 24-hour, beer-and-pizza-fueled social environment within which folks can build and demonstrate unique product ideas and enhancements. Unlike last year’s event, though, this one will be held in a palace overlooking London.

The whole YDN team will be there for the event, as well as a number of US- and UK-based Yahoo! folks. I’ll personally be in London Wed, June 13, through Sunday, June 17, so if you’ll be there too (or happen to live there), drop me a line.

But most importantly, come out and make something.

Other posts about the event:

• Matt McAlister, Yahoo! co-conspirator
• Matt Cashmore, event producer on BBC’s Backstage team
• Ian Forrester, also a member of the Backstage team
• Chris Riley, excited participant

PS: Happy Cinco de Micah!

Every 3 months, Yahoos from all parts of the company have 24 hours to build new products (or enhancements to existing products) with the express goal of showcasing their work in front of the company… and its top executives.

It’s what we’ve dubbed “Hack Day,” and it’s been remarkably successful at bubbling up top ideas and talent to decision makers internally… and then out to our users.*

So, it was out of our most recent event that Loc Amigos emerged. Fellow Developer Network crony Jason Levitt drummed up the idea of scouring the address books of a user’s different mail accounts to find which social networks these contacts may already be a part of… sure beats the current approach most use of sending emails to everyone in your address book. Using the Yahoo! Mail APIs as well as some screen-scrapers for Hotmail, AOL Mail, and Gmail, as well as the YUI user interface libraries, Jason worked with Kathleen Watkins and I to quickly assemble a working version of the product.

Does it work? Absolutely. Is it the best user interface for this sort of challenge? No way… but, it demonstrates something very important: a small, nimble team quickly working on a proof-of-concept can take a cool idea, get a working prototype, and now take it into usability labs to get real user feedback.

It’s this rapid, entrepreneurial spirit that is still fostered inside Yahoo!, and makes it a very exciting place to work. Even more exciting, the Developer Network (of which I’m now a part of) works on projects like this all the time in efforts to demonstrate and test the very APIs and Web Services we promote. It’s hard to imagine a more collaborative, inspiring environment, especially one built to encourage others (whether individual designers/developers, startups, or even our competitors) to succeed in similar ways using our (and others’) tools.

* For more on what Hack Day is, and why it rocks, see Chad Dickerson’s post on Yahoo! Hack Days as well as Matt McAlister’s Top 10 Reasons Hack Day Rocks.

Laaker is joining YDN to build and lead the new user experience group for the team. The Sunnyvale-based company, now 10+ years old, began as the web’s Yellow Pages, and now has grown to be the #1 start page, #1 email service, and a host of informative, entertaining, and addictive services. Its Developer Network provides tools, code, and assistance for people outside the company to utilize Yahoo! services (such as Search, Maps, CSS and JavaScript, and even the insanely popular Answers).

To announce this move, Laaker was interviewed by good friend and colleague Matt McAlister. A portion of this interview has been made available for public consumption:

1. What is your biggest user experience pet peeve on the Internet?
   Data duplication. As a user, I am forced to pay a data surrender toll with every new site I visit: my name, email, password, zip code, photo, and sometimes much more. While I’m probably a little too comfortable sharing such information, it becomes frustrating when I move, change job titles, switch photos, etc., as I then have to revisit and update every site I’ve entered such info. Further, if I then decide I don’t want people to know where I live, or what I look like, I’ve got a similar distributed information management issue.

   Managing these profiles also carries risks for all the individual companies/startups that maintain and store such info; if their accounts are sabotaged, and sensitive information is revealed, they’re liable. Looking forward, if there’s a way for everyone to access a common platform for user profile, preferences, and basic information (with the appropriate security controls and management interface), we can make our users’ online lives easier to maintain and control. Providing that sense (and reality) of control, as well as the benefits of recognition (such as automatically knowing what ZIP code to use for weather, movie theater locations, and maps, or providing quick access to your address book), will be a great leap forward for our online experiences.

   We want to make users do as little work as possible to get what they want from our products (and yours). Instead, we should shoulder the burden behind the scenes, listen to what our users tell us (both in what they say, as well as what they do), and provide experiences that excite and engage them everyday.

2. What web site do you wish you had designed?
   ClaimID. They took a leadership position around connecting users’ various identities across multiple sites using the MicroID microformat. The beauty of their approach was twofold: 1. allow users to make claims to their various profiles without requiring verification, and 2. leverage an easy-to-implement, open format that is simple for the developers to integrate. They’ve kept their interaction simple and minimal, their scenarios in context with the action just taken, and play nicely both with the competition (such as other OpenID providers) and the collegial (e.g. support for Gravatars and multiple microformats).
3. Show us one of the more clever user experiences you’ve seen on the Internets recently?
   I would encourage folks to check out the Upcoming/Flickr integration. For an example, check out the YUI 1st-Year Anniversary Party. The photos shown near the comments area are sucked in by users adding a tag to their Flickr photos. Further, once such a tag is entered on the Flickr side, it is hidden from users (as its in computer-readable but human-ugly format) and instead is reflected with an Upcoming.org icon and a link to the associated event.

   Simple, community-powered cross-site integration is a beautiful thing. By emerging from the community, Upcoming and Flickr were able to add useful functionality for their users (i.e. photos shown on events’ pages, and event listings linked from photos) that allows best-of-breed tools to focus on what they do best, rather than trying to build competing offerings inside of each that don’t quite do what users want. By doing so, users can pivot off of photos/events (via hidden tags) and better represent the activities in which they are participating.

4. What’s the best invention in man’s recorded history?
   The newspaper. As a medium that cuts its cost-to-entry so as to provide the masses with vital information, critical thinking, and calls-to-action every day, the newspaper wins it hands down for me. I would rate books highly, as well as free hosting/publishing platforms (like Blogger and WordPress.com) for similar reasons. I also think very fondly of my Nintendo DS Lite; it’s too early to tell on that one, though.
5. Who was your favorite band in 8th grade?
   Public Enemy, if I remember correctly.
6. If you were a Muppet, who would you be?
   Statler. He always heckled with a smile.
7. What does your wife find most annoying about you?
   Good question. My guess? Including her in the press releases I write. (I usually have to edit her back out; she’s not as liberal with sharing her info online.)
8. If you had to listen to the collective works of one musical artist over and over again until you died, who would you listen to?
   Time and again, Paul Simon seems to win out for me, so I would have to choose him. My Last.fm profile, however, tells a different story, with U2 blowing everything else out of the water. Secretly, though, Justin Timberlake would probably be the least melancholy way to go out.
9. Does altruism exist?
   One of the most enjoyable benefits of being a Yahoo is our Yahoo! Employee Foundation… its a self-sufficient, not-for-profit organization that is funded entirely by Yahoo! employees. It’s not a company mandate, and it wasn’t spawned by the company. Rather, it was spawned by those fortunate to work here who wanted to use the platform of this company as a means for good. So, does a corporate-affiliated organization prove altruism exists? No. But the people who’ve I met behind that organization, as well as my family and close friends, have repeatedly proven it time and again.
10. What interested you most about working at Yahoo!? How about YDN?
    If you don’t work inside Yahoo!, you may be surprised that we have more than 350 designers working worldwide (with 200+ here in California alone) to craft our users’ experiences. I came to Yahoo! to join an amazing group of designers, researchers, and analysts (not to mention fantastic product managers, engineers, and marketers) with a common goal: approach problem-solving from a user-centered perspective and iterate quickly while learning from actual users.

    I’ve long been a fan of our Developer Network as it provides a means of extending Yahoo! as a platform. For having “Web” in the title, the World Wide Web is a pretty disconnected experience. Yahoo! exists in a much larger ecosystem, but there’s currently very few examples of a connected experience (i.e. what a user does on Amazon affects what they see/do on Yahoo! and what they see/do on a personal blog). And, if Yahoo! begins to serve not only as a user-facing destination but also the glue between numerous online destinations/services, we’ll have a fair bit of work ahead of us to ensure a solid, trusted, and enriching experience that our users associate with the Yahoo! brand. (Side note: I’m looking to hire talented designers and prototypers to help define Yahoo!’s off-network experiences ; if you’re interested, please drop me a line with examples of your work.)

It was actually this “Post to del.icio.us” addition that got me to thinking: why not add Yahoo!’s other two bookmarking tools as well? Shortly after experimenting with del.icio.us, Yahoo! released MyWeb: a competitor to the public bookmarking/tagging tool which accommodated privacy, page caching, and prioritization of saved pages on Yahoo! search results. And it was this last feature (search prioritization) that has kept me a MyWeb user, as opposed to the ever-popular del.icio.us. (Since the release of two upgrades to the MyWeb service, Yahoo! Bookmarks 2.0 has begun rolling out in beta with an improved interface and folder categorization as well as tagging, although all entries saved are private-only.)

So, how to add these tools, too, to NetNewsWire? Repeated efforts of modifying the original del.icio.us AppleScript (among others) resulted in some half-working tools: items in an RSS feed could be posted, but the URLs of the Safari/WebKit-rendered tabs’ pages were ignored. Sadly, that’s where I would generally find the interesting pages I wanted to bookmark.

Then, I happened to discover Deeje Cooley’s “Tag This” for NetNewsWire script example. Magic. By stripping the code back down to a similar construct as the original del.icio.us scripts and adding the appropriate URLs, I got to a working solution. Now, when I find an RSS feed item or browse to a page that I want to save to one of these services, I can simply select my script in the NetNewsWire script menu. Immediately, Safari (or whichever Web browser you have selected as your default) will fire open in the background with tag and note entry fields ready for quick saving.

Want to try them out yourself? Download them today, un-ZIP, and move into

˜/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts/

before firing up NetNewsWire. You can download the files here:

• Yahoo! Bookmarks 2.0
• Yahoo! MyWeb

Unfortunately, these scripts don’t seem to work with NetNewsWire Lite, the free (albeit with a somewhat reduced feature set) counterpart to its non-Lite sibling. That may be more of a limitation of my knowledge of scripting, though, than a real NetNewsWire Lite limitation.

Next up is seeing if I can get this to work for Vienna, which is an open-source newsreader that has already seen some good work on extending the application.

Users of the new Yahoo! home page are now able to set a network-wide Default location on their computer, thus allowing any location field on the network (including the three on the home page) to pre-populate with their chosen locale. Users can also engage a redesigned, AJAX-powered drop-down widget next to each location field to access recent and saved locations, as well as manage and save their preferred locations… all in context of the content they are trying to modify.

Recent Activity

After user testing a number of solutions on Yahoo! Tech, I worked with the Yahoo! Media Group to implement a scalable framework for multi-subject, recently-viewed items for the newly-released Yahoo! Food. The Recent Activity module (which sits on any content page in the right “My” bar) allows users to quickly return to past-seen pages and will soon accommodate the saving of favorite items for viewing later (or on different devices).

Social Media tools

Working closely with Matt McAlister, I helped architect, design, and code the first phase of a multi-prong offensive structured to empower publishers with the tools to quickly allow the sharing, saving, and subscribing of their content by their users.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network currently hosts a page showing anyone how to add and modify these tools to accommodate multiple publisher needs.

To coincide with the launch of the new Yahoo! Podcasts, I developed an extensible badge framework which allowed publishers to showcase Yahoo! users’ collective rating of their podcast series, as well as a mechanism to encourage viewers to rate the series within the badge itself. Publishers can configure the layout and appearance of their badge using an online tool.

“Today marks a great step forward for users of the ‘World Wide Web,’” stated Laaker. “Yahoo! has provided users with more than 10 years of great free content and services. But today, some of those great free products and services now proudly carry a ‘Made in the USA by the double A’ sticker… even if that sticker isn’t actually on said products and services.”

Responding to questioning that the “double A” referenced in the sticker slogan suggested that recovering drunks were being employed by Yahoo!, Mr. Laaker refused further statements, instead encouraging all to check out his latest creations:

• My Yahoo! Dashboard widget
  Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” users are now (for the first time ever) able to view the most recent collective headlines from all their My Yahoo! subscribed RSS feeds in Apple’s new Dashboard environment. The widget, designed by Laaker, also allows checking of Yahoo! mail and initiation of Yahoo! searches. (Apple subsequently named the widget their Featured Download for May 13th.)

• Network-wide Default Location and Location Preferences
  Users of Yahoo! Local Search will now be able to set a network-wide Default location on their computer, thus allowing any location field to pre-populate with their chosen locale. They can also engage a re-designed drop-down widget next to each location field to access recent and saved locations, as well as manage and save their preferred locations on a Location Preferences page.

• New My Yahoo! Feed Addition Process
  Reducing the complexity of adding feeds to My Yahoo! from non-Yahoo! sources required some re-engineering of the process. Thankfuly, by simplifying the number of steps required for non-My Yahoo! users to sign up and add their selected content, this effort should significantly reduce new user frustration. (I rearchitected the page shown in this link, too, to better focus on the call-to-action and reduce the visual competition.)

Laaker also noted that he was moving from the My Yahoo! product team into the role of Design Manager for the newly-formed Personalization Products Group. Under the auspices of this group, Laaker would be responsible for managing the user experience components of network-wide personalization and content sharing/subscription/management.