So here goes a quick recap of the last few weeks.

As I mentioned above, yesterday we launched a great new streamlined pop-up OAuth flow for developers to use. Check out Allen Tom‘s post on YDN to learn more. Here’s what the new UI looks like:

But beyond this, check out these other great announcements from the last few weeks:

• A bunch of new open applications in Yahoo! (to learn how to build apps, check out YAP)
• Yahoo!’s distribution of Hadoop
• Cocoa library for Y!OS APIs (this means we make it easier to take Yahoo! APIs to the iPhone)
• Ability to extract known locations from your documents with Yahoo! Placemaker
• Open Tables in YQL (this lets your host your data in YQL for other developers to use and build killer applications with)
• Not new technology…but I attended Yahoo!’s London Hack Day this year and had a blast! Check out the interview I did with PaidContent.

Finally, make sure to check out these presentations from Micah Laaker on 13 different ways to define open, how to design for developers, and how to use Yahoo! as a billboard for your project,

Ok, hopefully that’s enough of an update for you for now. There’s a lot going on. There’s much more to come!

Cheers,
-c

It’s just all part of the “California lifestyle”…

It is a slideshow and photosharing site with some cool user interaction design. You can add different backgrounds in the frame, and anyone can comment on any photo if logged in, even in the distributed slideshow on MySpace or a blog. Their FAQ mentions something about a label, but I don’t see where that is.

Here’s a quick slideshow I made with photos of my recent trip to Paris.

They have an “Add to MySpace” functionality too so you don’t have to even look at the embed codes if that isn’t your thing. DISCLAIMER: Before you go there and make fun of me, you should know that my MySpace page is horribly horribly awful.

Their differentiating factor appears to be that they are building a reputational element to the slideshows (Frames), such that some frame styles are locked until you have a certain amount of interaction on your current slideshows. One of their FAQs states:

What are check$?
Each check is like a penny, so 100 check$ are like a dollar. When people view or “flip” your FlipFrame, you earn check$. Check$ can be used to purchase exclusive locked frames or in the check store to buy prizes.

It also looks like they will soon be launching a handful of other verticalized services.

The site has been live for just a few hours, so I’m sure they’ll be firefighting bugs and such all weekend. But check it out and play around with it. If you have feedback, it looks like they’ll take it here. Congrats again guys! Pretty sweet! I know it was a lot of hard work.

Pretty clever (and reminds me of the New Yorker cover of Newyorkistan from 2001). It seems to be greatly missing the MySpace ecosystem sites like Photobucket, Slide, RockYou, etc. Maybe it needs to be a border dispute somewhere near the MySpace area.

Wonderful survey of the greatest magazine covers from the last 40 years. I remember receiving a few of these in the mail (New Yorker and Wired) and being blown away.

For my full thoughts on what this could mean for Yahoo! and Right Media, check out my post on the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog, which should appear on Monday morning. (UPDATE: The YPN Blog post is now up and live here).

For now, I just want to say the following: Massive congratulations to everyone at Right Media, and especially to the Direct Media Exchange team, who share the Yahoo! Publisher Network team’s dedication and drive to help publishers of all sizes realize the full value of publishing. Pat, Cam, Pete, Travis, Brad, Jerri, Michael, Shane, Leland, Becca, Juliana, Vincent, Joseph, Luke, Edward, Chuck, Ellie, Eric, Trent, Alexander, Brian, Brandon and Jon (and if I missed anyone, I’m really sorry!), all of us at Yahoo! Publisher Network look forward to working with you and combining efforts in order to really make a difference in the online self-publishing landscape. Your enthusiam for the difference you are making in the online publishing world blew me away last week (check it out, they even recently had a Hack Day!). I look forward to working with each of you!

But on to more important topics with a quick but fun post. As mentioned, today is Earth Day, and about 35 minutes ago I closed an auction on eBay for a beautiful Anaheim-based 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300D, the Turbo Diesel variety. Consider this my birthday present to our planet…and here’s why:

I bought this slick ride with the plan to convert it to run on vegetable oil.

Lovecraft Biofuels, which is right down the street from my house, can do the conversion for less than $1000 all-in. For those of you not hip to the vegetable oil movement, any diesel car can be converted with minimal cost to enable it to run on any combination of diesel, biodiesel, clean/straight vegetable oil (svo) or waste vegetable oil (wvo). Clean veggie oil can be obtained in bulk at places like Costco or Sam’s Club and supposedly works out to about $3 a gallon (as long as you have the arm strength to lug about 100 lbs of oil to the parking lot once a week or so). Or, even better, there are people who will deliver waste vegetable oil (which can be collected for free from restaurants anywhere) to your house in bulk for about $2 a gallon! The great thing about the vegetable oil conversion is that the exhaust is nearly 100% biodegradable. And (supposedly!) the car won’t really lose any power or torque after the transition.

I’ll keep you posted with updates about the conversion process and my experiences obtaining oil. In the meantime, here’s my cherry new ride!

Exterior (Pearl Black)

Interior (Cherry Red!)

This article outlines some productive ways to get involved with the Yahoo! Answers community as a means of driving traffic to your blog.

I’m a 24 addict. I admit it. I think I’ve spent 5 full days of my life watching it, as I don’t think I’ve missed an episode over 5 seasons. This (surely not official) Twitter page is great.

I’ve held off my excitement about March Madness publicly, but this column has the same Final Four picks as me…and a much funnier way of rationalizing it. Go Jayhawks!