Yahoo opens its doors

Pretty bold move for Yahoo. They’re opening up the doors to Yahoo Mail and creating an open API. Of course, tons of other companies have already done so, but it’s clearly a great step in the right direction.

So, amature programmers are able to build their own hooks into Yahoo Mail now, just like theyv’e been able to do for Flickr and Google maps and all sorts of other apps. Is anybody teaching their middle school/secondary school students how to tap build upon an existing API?

I have no idea what that really means or how I would do it. Of course, I’ve taught people all kinds of things that I don’t really understand at all in the past. As many people have blogged about, perhaps the time of understanding a technology before you introduce it to students is past.

So who wants to be the first in the swimming pool and have their students create a new front end for Yahoo Mail? Once they do, see if they’ll agree to doing a webinar to teach me to do the same!