Activity streams (whether Facebook’s news feed, Twitter’s tweet stream, Yahoo!’s Updates, LinkedIn’s network activity, MySpace’s Stream or those using the activitystrea.ms format) are all the rage around the Web now. In each instance, users publish directly (via entering your comment into a Sharing dialog box) or indirectly (by the system generating content based on an […]

This Friday, on June 11th, at roughly 8pm CST, I’m turning 35. That’s 35 years of high-quality content livin’ that I’m proud to have sponsored, but the clock’s ticking. So I’m turning to you, who’ve tuned in for some portion of that time, free of charge, to help with the only pledge drive I’ve run. […]

Back in 2008 just after the iPhone had received its first major OS revision, I posited that Apple would update its Apple TV to use iPhone OS apps. Nothing of the sort has happened… yet. But now, with Google TV having just been announced at Google I/O (where its Android platform powers the Apps, the […]

I was a bit saddened tonight when I heard that Gary Coleman passed away today. Like most Americans my age, I’ve had my fair share of laughs at Gary’s expense over the years. But, unlike most, I actually got to spend an evening with Gary at the close of the century, and it was quite […]

Today, I was part of a big announcement we made at Yahoo!: Zynga has signed a partnership agreement with us to bring its games to our network in force. 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 […]

Just a quick thought that I’ve been meaning to write about but never do: Apple’s iPhone didn’t start out a closed ecosystem; as I remember, Apple fought the good “open” fight against all the developer and press grumblings when they announced their Web Apps strategy with the initial iPhone release. All they heard was whining […]

Outside of an iPad purchase, you probably have a lot of purchases you’ve made online. And from those purchases, you have receipts from them in your email client. Email’s great, but those receipts compete for attention with email from your mom, friends, colleagues, etc. which makes them hard to find when you’re trying to look […]

(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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]