open-hack-london

I have to say I'm pretty excited about this weekend - Once again Yahoo! are opening their doors to invite hundreds of hacker/developers from around the world to come and take part in their Open Hackday in London. I don't think Yahoo! staff are officially allowed to take part in any of the hacks - or at least, probably not allowed to submit an entry to the judges, but I'm really looking forward to helping out with logistics and enjoying the atmosphere. I bet there will be some awesome creations this year. Looking at what's hot at the moment, I'm expecting a good parade of hacks involving Yahoo!'s open platforms - YQL, YUI, BOSS, Blueprint, YAP, ASTRA etc - probably served with slices of Twitter, iPhone, Flickr, AudioBoo.

The weird thing about today's hack landscape is that I can't think of a single interface recently introduced by Google which makes a compelling hack candidate. Isn't that weird - a few years ago all the earliest mashups usually blended Google Maps with other data services (I seem to remember Rasmus demo'ing a UPS package tracker running against the Google Maps API), but what is there today from the Google offering which might make an appearance this weekend? Looking at Yahoo!'s open APIs I guess we can all draw our own conclusions about where the real fun is happening on the web :):)

Here's to Open Hack London 2009!