Yahoo announced this afternoon a “Yahoo! Updates Firehose service” that will provide a stream of activity gathered from various Web services, from Flickr uploads to YouTube favorites to blog comments and more.
The firehose will provide a stream of real-time data from Yahoo’s index, which will also include Twitter data, as part of a deal the two companies made last February.
According to Yahoo, the firehose will include “a real-time feed of every public action taken on our network and elsewhere around the Web that users have authorized Yahoo! to make available.” This data will consist of “status updates, ratings and reviews, comments on stories, Buzz votes, Flickr uploads, Delicious bookmarking, tweets, Open App activity, YouTube favoriting, and Last.fm listening, among many others.”
Developers will be able to access the data using Yahoo Query Language, a “SQL-like query language”, and parse this information by a number of criteria, from language to location to all updates associated with a specific URL.
While companies like Twitter have already offered a firehose of its data, and Facebook is expected to release its own in the very near future (likely at the F8 conference), there are few, if any, firehoses of large swaths of data such as this. The closest we came up with at the moment was Gnip, which provides a single API to connect with dozens of other Web services and their APIs.
According to the company, the firehose will provide access to more than 150,000 ratings, 8,000 reviews and 750,000 comments a day.
