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I have to hand it to Yahoo, they’ve really outdone themselves with the Yahoo Developer Network. These folks designed a great site and they made sure to pay a great deal of attention to detail. They have source code examples in all of the popular languages, and their documentation is outstanding. Which of Yahoo’s Web Services can you interface with? Almost all of them!

Even the Yahoo acquired properties like Flickr and del.ici.us are well represented here. Yahoo has attempted to use a unified interface, where applicable, and accessing the data is relatively easy, depending on your programming knowledge.

. Of particular interest is the Yahoo! User Interface Library, which can help you build a website with a unified user interface using Yahoo! code.

The amount of code available is so immense, that there’s no point attempting to cover it a short summary like this one. Instead, I encourage you to investigate the page and see some of the APIs available. I wrote a short application today using Siteexplorer which went together surprisingly easily, considering it was the first time I used the API. The documentation and example code is very straightforward. I plan on covering more uses of the API in the future, but I figured I’d introduce this incredible resource to anyone who hadn’t heard of it yet.

This post extends on a conversation I was having with Gomer. In it, we discussed what Web 2.0 means to us, and we both admit although it’s new to us, we think the concept is the future. Usability is what seperates the “men from the boys” in a sense in the online world. Picture almost any website that you’ve visited in the last few years frequently. It’s a site you “use” isn’t it? Well now we can one step further. When we use the site, it changes along with our input. This makes web usability a fluid environment. But we need to be even more specific in our terminology, since imprecise language is a potential pitfall of communication. Let’s look at a real world example and see how it meets our criteria of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 sites respond to users. A great example of this is NetVibes. NetVibes greets you with a generic page that says “Type your name here”. You type your name and Netvibes saves it!

That’s a delightful feeling and incredibly intuitive. You aren’t confronted with a lengthy signup process in order to use the service. That type of immediacy is perfect in a world of immediate gratification seekers.

Web 2.0 websites get information from other sources. Netvibes doesn’t supply it’s own backend for data. It’s merely a collection of data from other sources. Netvibes exists in order to help you organize information that’s already there!

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One of the key advantages to the Web 2.0 websites is just how hell they’ve grown, and mostly through word-of-mouth advertising from satisfied users. The idea is simple: your users become evangelists. Since they’re happy with your service, they tell us others, who tell others, and so on and so on. This is the key principle to building a vast membership.

Web 2.0 sites are also known for fast adoption by the masses. This is the “velocity” factor that a growing website needs to get off the ground. But one thing I can’t see working to make a “Web 2.0″ website popular is advertising. In a sense, that’s missing the point. And if a company does advertise their website, they need to be subtle, and let the people find out for themselves just how great it is.

The branding should come from the usage. I think that’s one of the biggest advantages to the Web 2.0 startups. They don’t have to allocate a ton of their money to traditional advertising and marketing. That way, they can put even more money into usability, which creates a virtuous circle when it comes to promotions. New features are enough to make your rabid users go even more viral on you.

The best bet is building your website and “they” will come. The better the site is, the faster the users will head in. And each of your users has friends and associates who they’ll influence into trying. Usability needs to be the key mantra. If the usability suffers, the marketing issues will suffer along side. The Web 2.0 companies that cater to their users ahead of everything else (even monetization) will have a leg up on their competition.

I stumbled along a nice website today using my Bloglines. The site is ProgrammableWeb, which is dedicated to keeping us up to date on the latest “mashups” from the Web 2.0 universe.

. What a “mashup” is, is a web application derived by using the “APIs” of several web services. Simply, a new website is made, that pulls data from other websites and presents it in a unique and interesting fashion.

Mashups are popular for a ton of good reasons. Mashups are a great way to unleash the originality in people, and ProgrammableWeb offers some contests in order to appeal to people’s competive natures. The best website are featured, and that gives them additional exposure in the Web 2.0 space.

ProgrammableWeb is a definitely repository for APIs and Mashups, so I suggest you take a look at it. Some of the listed websites are just spectactular for their ingenuity, and they give you an idea of what you can do, if you’re so inclined.

If Web 2.0 really is a different place, than it probably needs its’ own set of rules. At least, that’s the thinking behind a new social media press release template that is making its’ way through the Blogosphere.. Web 2.0 represents a chance for users to get involved, and for that reason alone, marketing to a “Web 2.0″ person represents a chance at aiming an effective marketing message at a tech-savvy individuals.

Take a look at the template for the social media press release. This could be pretty useful for almost anyone currently doing press releases online.

The package could be very useful for anyone. I particularly like the add to Digg and del.icio.us buttons built right in. “Re-mixable” media is becoming a bigger part of journalists jobs, so why not make it easier for them to find you and your links? A good philosophy, indeed.

We’re seeing all kinds of Web 2.0 applications, and some of them are quite impressive. But we haven’t seen the true power of Web 2.0 just yet, IMHO, until we find an application that harnesses two of the biggest trends going:

1) More people use mobile devices to access the internet
2) More people are Non-English speakers than ever before

An application that can harness these markets could improve the way people live and work. A website that worked like a Babel Fish, and could translate all of the languages on Earth at once, coupled with the ability to run on cell phones, could transform marketplaces into truly global ones, where each participant had an equal chance at success.

Big traditional web success stories like EBay and Amazon have gone a long way towards fulfilling their potential, but have they truly transformed the world? Have they made information or products more accessible to the general populace? In some ways, traditional web companies still serve primarily the elite users. True Web 2.0 success will rely on the website that make people’s lives actually better, and include more people than ever in the process.

Web 2.0 makes a lot of sense, and the sites that are adopting the mindset are doing quite well. There’s one central precept that I think is essential to continued success: Web 2.0 websites must be reliable, in order to build strong relationships with repeat visitors. Users come to rely on websites that they visit daily, and poor technical performance is one sure way to turn them off.

Web 2.0 websites will tend to grow fast, but are they scalable? If you start a website that become really popular, do you have the resources in order to grow it out? You need a plan upfront, because word-of-mouth can help a website grow fast. If you break down as you grow, you’ll miss the vital viral traffic when people give up on getting to you.

One of the central tenets of the Vision of Web 2.0 is that software will be centrally located, and simultaneously delivered to the populace. Web services are at the core of the strategy, and even behemoth Microsoft dump $2 billon into Web 2.0 struggle. Microsoft realizes that they can’t deliver computer software via retail channels anymore. Of course a company like Microsoft will end up cannabalizing their older and more profitable business, but in the long run they’ll be a lot more capable of dealing with the Web 2.0 Poster Child Google.

If you’re building a Web 2.0 application, you too must build reliablity and scalability into your website or you may experience an intial burst of enthusiam followed by a quick decline into oblivion. If you do it right, you’re well on your way to success in the new web environment.