As I noted in my work blog, Yahoo!, LinkedIn and Google have been making much headway in the realm of social application development.
I spent a few hours last night playing around with the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP) SDK, a simple PHP API that makes it easy to retrieve user profile information from Yahoo!. The hardest part of doing all this was generating a set of OAuth credentials from my development workstation (my laptop) and getting Yahoo to validate such credentials.
I found this rather annoying to accomplish from my home network as OAuth requires that Yahoo! be able to call-back into my personal web server in order to verify that I own the domain. Given that this is my home network and my laptop is behind a NAT firewall, this wasn’t going to be easy.
It didn’t take me too long to implement a solution that leveraged wildcard DNS, the Pound reverse proxy / load balancer and port forwarding. Perhaps a bit of overkill, but my home network is not typical and is rather complex.
Anyway, what I’m really keen on doing is using Google App Engine to develop an app that can be consumed as both a Google Gadget as well as Yahoo! Apps. Eventually, I’d like to see if I can make it work on LinkedIn as well.
I don’t know when/if I’ll actually be able to do this, considering my copious spare time, but I’ll provide updates here as things progress.