Nestoria Blog

For this month’s Nestoria interview we have the pleasure of chatting with Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering for Yahoo!’s Geo Technologies Group.

Over the past year Yahoo! has rolled out several geography related services for the developer community. Most innovative has been location broker service Fire Eagle. Perhaps more impressive from a technical point of view is the recently released Yahoo! GeoPlanet API. Services like these are rapidly becoming part of the core infrastructure of the web and make life much easier for application developers like Nestoria (another great example is Yahoo!’s excellent user interface library which we use heavily). Beyond providing these tools, various Yahoo! consumer services - most notably flickr - have been particularly innovative in their use of the concept of ‘location’ to add to the value of their offering.

Gary, many thanks for meeting with us.

1. What are the goals of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies group and why are you providing these services to the online community?

We create technologies that connect Yahoo!’s users with the world around them. You’ll see these directly with our developer tools such as GeoPlanet, our Maps APIs, and Fire Eagle of course, but our technology also quietly underlies most Yahoo! web sites — we’re the ones who ensure that you receive local, georelevant information when you search at or browse Yahoo!

2. What are some of the coolest apps you’ve seen, and what apps do you hope to see emerge in the next year or so?

“Cool” is a very subjective and personal thing so this is very much my own take on this topic. When we released the GeoPlanet web service, people produced mashups to explore the API and to understand the underlying data. My favourite was YPlaces, a mashup which allowed you to delve into the WOEID hierarchy that a place was part of. It also illustrated how many differing services, in this case Yahoo! GeoPlanet, Google Maps, PropertyMaps and Microsoft Virtual Earth could come together to produce a cohesive app.

I’m a big Fire Eagle fan and update my location at least twice a day so I’m always on the lookup for an iPhone location updater. I’ve tried them all but keep coming back to yofe!. It’s lightweight, elegant and does exactly what you want it to do without any additional overhead or eye candy; it’s almost UNIX like in its’ simplicity.

But I still think the coolest stuff is the geo technology my Engineering teams have produced and which drive Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet and most of the Yahoo! web sites. This is the technology that knows that in a string such as “great coffee in London”, London is the place and that it’s most probable that London, UK is the London that is being referenced. That’s very cool. Even more so is the fact this this technology knows this in many languages and that London, Londra, Londres and ロンドン are all the same place. I use this technology every day and I still find it fascinating and very, very cool.

3. What perspective does Yahoo! have on the pure opensource geo tools and datasets that are emerging (for example OpenStreetMap)

Yahoo! is a huge supporter of (and contributor to!) Open Source, and the Geo Technologies team is similarly enthusiastic here. We’ve recently opened GeoPlanet, our global resource of named places, and we are striving to make all of our geo technologies as open and accessible as possible. We’re very impressed with what is coming out of OpenStreetMap.org, and assist with their mission where we can.

4. What do you see as the best opportunities for a vertical search engine like Nestoria to take advantage of the new services being offered by Yahoo! and your major competitors?

Yahoo! is very much aware of the value of geo-informed, local data. Place and Location are the centre of all things — any products and web sites that provide geo-relevant information to their users should be looking very closely indeed at geographic and mapping tools. Indeed trendwatching.com has identified geo and maps, or “mapmania” as they term it, as one of the six key trends for 2009. My favourite quote from the trend report is “any consumer-focused brand would be stupid not to be partnering or experimenting with map-based services” and this pretty much sums up why geo is such a great domain to work in

Thanks Gary. We look forward to witnessing and benefiting from the increasingly rapid pace of innovation from Yahoo!. You can learn more about what the Yahoo! Geo group is up to over on the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Muki Haklay, Brad Inman, Simon Baker.