Yahoo Images JavaScript API Integration
Summary
Yahoo's current status and image in the online market place is a little different than Google's. Google brands itself as a functional utility, through various forms like it's mapping, email, or search, where as Yahoo brands itself in a slightly more social context. This comes from it's portal homepage, it's online editorial properties, as well as it's financial focus.
It was for this reason that we decided to include Yahoo's Image Search API into our community platform. While this may seem slightly redundant, we found that there were very distinct approaches that Google and Yahoo took to image searching and embedding. Yahoo's results seemed to be focused on a more social contextual level. For example, if you did a search for swimming with Google Image Search, you may see symbols representing the act of swimming, or a person swimming. On Yahoo however, the results tended to revolve more around the social context of swimming; so a community pool with a family swimming, and such.
Integration
The Yahoo Image Search API operates in a very similar way as our other JavaScript API integrations. Yahoo has been in our research and experience, one of the dominant players in opening up their platform. While Google has done a great deal as well, it still reserves it's search functionality as proprietary, where as Yahoo as focused on more open initiatives like that of it's BOSS platform.
Our integration with Yahoo therefore comes from a great deal of experience working with their API's and documentation. They are a strong supporter of sharing their lessons and research with the general public through their developer network, and have therefore created a very strong API that was easy to implement.
With their API, your community will be exposed to similar functionality as the Google Image Search API, including, search, embedding, cropping, rating, and comment on Yahoo originated images.
Result
The result of our integration gives your community one more option for bringing media to your community. Watch as they do searches on Yahoo!, from within your branded community, for images or pictures and crop and/or embed them on profile pages, video pages, or flickr style photo pages.
This extra level of external media integration will again establish yourself as being connected to the major brands, and bring with it a sense of authority. This will create strong visitor loyalty and a sense of security and authenticity that will help your community remain memorable and relevant.
