Heather and I co-wrote a post for Flickr Blog, so I’ll keep this one short.

I think it was somewhere around 3am, while I was making the rounds passing out free Red Bull to appreciative hackers (Leonard and I made a middle of the night run to and buy out an entire store’s inventory), that I realized how much I love working where I do.

Oh yeah, Beck rocked. (And his puppets sure like to rub some felt…)

Photos by bitmapr, stewart, laughingsquid, mroth, and flickrjo. See also interesting photos tagged “hackday06″ on Flickr.

While the rest of the schedule hasn’t been posted yet, you can be assured it’s going to be fun. Really fun. (Well, it’ll help if you’re at least a little bit nerdy… but that describes about 98% of the Bay Area population.) We’ve got some big surprises lined up, but the coolest stuff will likely be the things we don’t anticipate at all — HackDay has this way of having insanely fun stuff just emerge, ad-hoc and unplanned.

I’ll be there, along with a few other members of the Flickr team, and am very much looking forward to seeing all the interesting and novel hacks people will come up with. If you’re interested in attending, I strongly remind you to register right away, since space is going to be quite limited.

If you have tried out the feature yet, below is an example of what it looks like — here’s a screenshot I took last night while browsing photos taken on Alcatraz:

For me, the most exciting part of this technology — especially as a social technologist / researcher — will be seeing what new and unexpected uses the vibrant user community will produce in short order. I’m a firm believer that the users themselves will almost always come up with more interesting and compelling uses of technology than the inventors: that’s one of the philosophies that drives me to be involved in this field, and it’s always exciting to watch the new uses of a technology emerge and (sometimes) stabilize. By bringing geotagging to the masses (others did it first, but not in a mass-market way), Flickr has now become, in under 24 hours, the premiere source of data for studying how real-world people use geotagging technology.

Speaking of new and unexpected uses of technology, if you’re a hacker in the Bay Area, be sure to sign up for the first external Yahoo! HackDay / Camp. It’s sure to be a blast — come make a Flickr geo hack that will blow us away.

Update: There’s now an official FlickrBlog post about this, and the Geo APIs are released for shenanigans.

Too busy to post a proper announcement! Short version that doesn’t reveal anything sensitive: I’m thrilled to be taking my areas of research expertise and applying them towards strategic operations to help shape the rapidly changing media landscape. :-)

The Onion and Web 2.0, Originally uploaded by jchaddickerson.

So sad I missed this.

Tom Cruise at YRB, Originally uploaded by rnair.

Since the word has apparently now gotten out about Tom Cruise speaking at Yahoo!, I thought I’d share this picture of him visiting our humble research lab in Berkeley.

Any similarities to my body is strictly coincidental.

Like many companies, Yahoo! has a large internal repository (“cookbook”) for this sort of code. The big news is: they’re giving it away. For free. To you.

• Yahoo! User Interface Library
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Get the full story at the new Yahoo! User Interface Blog.

In general, I think this is a good move in the spirit of the “cut and paste” code method many of us originally used when learning how to make a website. Code libraries like this make it easier to focus on the ideas when you are making something, rather than the icky details of the implementation. I’m looking forward to playing around with this myself–as a terrible designer, I can use all the help I can get.

(I hope this doesn’t read like a bad PR piece. No one has asked me to blog this, I’m just genuinely excited because this is one of the most hacker-friendly and cool things I’ve seen the company do since I’ve been there. To show I’m objective, I full admit there are many times Yahoo! does quite the opposite. Hopefully the trend continues in this positive direction.)

But since Yahoo! recently acquired del.icio.us, we now own two social bookmarking services, so I figured it was time to re-evaluate del.icio.us and see which one is currently best suited my needs for social bookmarking.

The results of my comparison were as follows:

Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0	del.icio.us	winner
Privacy settings allow you to have private and community-only bookmarks.  This has proven to be very useful for me in sharing with specific groups of people.	All bookmarks are public, making del.icio.us inappropriate for a complete bookmark replacement (unless you are an exhibitionist!)
Firefox extension via Yahoo! Toolbar is pretty lame, supports basic bookmarking but no contextual notes.	Firefox extension is more functional (supports contextual notes via highlighting) and better integrated (doesn’t use up an entire toolbar row).
Community features integrate with 360°’s existing social network, so that I see what my friends are bookmarking, which is incredibly cool.	If you manually tag stuff for:username, they may or may not see it…
Integrates with and affects web search, so I get better and more trusted search results. This is actually really effective and super neato.	No search integration.
Pages are automatically cached, in case the original source disapears later.	Nope.
Web site is hideously ugly and hard to navigate.	Web site is hideously ugly and hard to navigate.	Tie
User’s home URL is an attrocious 70 characters of gobbledygook that requires serious reverse engineering to locate.	http://del.icio.us/mroth
Stupid name that is completely unmemorable.	Even stupider name that is nearly impossible to type correctly.	Tie

My conclusion for the time being was to stick with MyWeb, although I’m somewhat disappointed. I really wish the two features that del.icio.us won on (decent URLs and a good Firefox extension) will be integrated into MyWeb soon, since that seems easier than integrating all the complex MyWeb Yahoo integration stuff into del.icio.us. Or perhaps I can somehow hack the del.icio.us Firefox extension to post to MyWeb instead?

For some of us at the Berkeley research lab, it also meant a trip down to the Santa Clara HQ. I assembled a team of four people, and we carpooled down to the SMG offices, where we loaded up on free caffeine and cool “WARNING: Hacking! Do not disturb!” stickers from Chad, and then locked ourselves in a conference room for the next 8 hours to frantically plan and code. Amazingly (especially for a bunch of social media researchers with no hardcore engineers on the team), we emerged at the end with a functional prototype of what we had set out to build. I can’t talk about the specifics of what we worked on yet, but the general idea for my team was something involving implementing features on top of the Flickr API. While I was pleased that my team managed to hit our target, I was absolutely blown away by some of the stuff presented by others. “You did that all today?” was a frequently overheard question.

For management, something like HackDay shows that giving engineers a day of “work on what you want” (with some constraints) can be an amazingly productive endeavor. The presentations ended up going into overtime as there were nearly fifty hacks to be presented.

The Hack Day experience was also a great reminder of how fun working in the Yahoo! environment can be. We had multiple people willing to help us out or point us in the right direction when we hit snafus (One engineer built a custom PHP module for us–over the phone from his house in Indiana–in order to help us out. When we hit a problem with the Flickr API twenty minutes prior to presenting, we just walked down the hall to FlickrHQ and Cal Henderson immediately pointed out the problem in our source code.)

Thanks Chad, for organizing this, and I hope it becomes a frequent occurrence in the future. But as Bradley pointed out, “the next one will go until midnight!”