We Now Support Microformats

location based services

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.
In less-techy terms, “microformats” are an open standard for structuring web page content in a meaningful and reusable way. At Yahoo, we’ve been big microformat fans — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter.
We believe in giving you more control over your data and the user experience on Yahoo! Local. With our microformat support, we’ve opened up new data and new possibilities for the developer community to build upon, to make tools that will be genuinely useful to all our users.
For now, most of the tools are pretty geeky, but this will change as adoption grows. Some of our favorites:
Tails Export for Firefox. This extension will detect and display microformats on any page and let you export them to Outlook, iCal, and more. hCalendar to Yahoo! Calendar.
Yesterday, Gordon from Upcoming.org modified an open-source Greasemonkey user script to add any hCalendar event to Yahoo! Calendar. If you’re using Greasemonkey and Firefox, try it out.
The Flocktails Extension for the Flock web browser detects microformats and shows how pretty they can be.
Many, many more are available on the Microformats wiki.
If you find (or build) any other cool utilities or apps, let us know!
Vince Maniago, Andy Baio, Ronny Choieand the Yahoo! Local Team
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
15 Responses to “We Now Support Microformats”
getluky.net » Dabbling with Greasemonkey Says: June 21st, 2006 at 6:11 pm
[…] As part of a very cool announcement on the part of Yahoo! Local, I ended up writing my first greasemonkey script yesterday. Local is now marking up events, business entities, and reviews with Microformats. This is an important announcement on Yahoo!’s part, not for the mere availability of the data (as it was always there), but instead because it means that development of third party applications for Yahoo! users can be accelerated. Such as, this GM script. Instead of copying-and-pasting, or hand-entering event info into your Y! Calendar, microformats make it simpler for the developer (me) to provide the end-user (you) with a bridge to move that info of interest around automatically. The general idea is that microformats are a catalyst for useful applications of data on the web, not as an end unto themselves. […]