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.

Reid Hoffman reminded me the other day that I needed to take a look at the LinkedIn Answers service, the peer-to-peer Q&A service for business. It obviously emulates much of the Yahoo! Answers product, particularly the user experience, so I thought I’d do a little test.

It surprised me in a way that I didn’t expect…

I wondered what would happen if I posted the same question in both LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo! Answers. Of course, I posted a work-related question. This would make the test as nearly apples-to-apples as it could be.

I’ve been wanting to know more about the API market, size, share, segmentation, and all that good market data that defines an industry. The web services market is pretty loosely defined still, and I want to know where the best research is. So here’s what I asked on both sites:

“Where is the best market research on APIs and web services?”

LinkedIn:
- 2 answers within a day
- Both pointed to John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb
- The 3rd post came in 5 days later listing a few relevant blogs in addition to ProgrammableWeb

Yahoo!:
- 2 answers in less than an hour
- The 1st answers also pointed to ProgrammableWeb
- The 2nd listed 3 more sites that were sort of relevant

I kind of expected this behavior, but I certainly didn’t expect that I would get the same answer in the end. Yes, ProgrammableWeb is very good. It’s a highly relevant answer to my question, though not exactly the answer I was hoping for.

In some ways, I expected LinkedIn to give me better answers given both the focus and also how broad the Yahoo! Answers demographic must be, but this shows how participatory media can reach incredibly deep into the micro niche even when it’s a mass consumer service.

So, who won this test? I’m inclined to believe that speed matters more, particularly if the answers turn out to be the same. What do you think?

Jeremy Zawodny and I produced another screencast last week, a look inside Pipes with Pasha Sadri and Ed Ho. The Pipes guys shared their insights while we asked a few questions and recorded the screen and the audio.

I’ve been trying to improve on each screencast with a new trick or some efficiency. This time I tried to mix in some relevant still shots in the editing process to support the voice over.

Camtasia was a little stickier here but still very easy to use. After setting up the production and editing out some bits, I used SnagIt to capture web site screen shots and crop them to focus on a small area. I imported them into the production. Then I added the screen shots to the Picture-in-picture track. Lastly, I zoomed in on each PIP file so it took up the whole screen and slid it along the timeline to get the right positioning with the audio.

There’s a segment toward the end of the video where Pasha is saying some really interesting stuff, however I didn’t have anything relevant to splice in visually. So, I didn’t quite get this right. But you’ll see that it works nicely in certain parts of the video. It keeps the pace going while people are talking. It also allows you to grab additional media that you didn’t think to pull up while recording the original video.

For example, Pasha mentions that there are several sites that have begun creating tutorials for Pipes, so I grabbed screensots of 3 that I found and layered them in.

I don’t think this is what the software was intended to do, so please tell me if you know a better way to accomplish this same effect. Here is the screencast which is also available on Yahoo! Video:

Friend and colleague Micah Laaker just joined us on the YDN team. You may recognize his name from the classic ACLU Pizza video that he directed. Here it is in case you haven’t seen it or forgot how great it is and want to watch again:

Micah posted an interview on his blog that I gave him as a new member of the team. Some good stuff there, too.

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.