Yahoo Meme, a rich-media microblog that originally started as a Portuguese-only web app and has since expanded to Spanish and English language versions, is often mistakenly called a Twitter clone.
However, in stark contrast to the 140-character wunder-app, Meme has proven in the months since its release to be a much better platform for multimedia sharing and cross-platform content curation. Now, the Tumblr/Twitter/Posterous hybrid is offering an API built on top of YQL, Yahoo!’s query language that we covered back in May, when we were impressed with its power, versatility, and uniqueness. The Yahoo team has already used the API to develop a version of Meme for smartphones.
According to the Yahoo Developer Network post announcing the release, “Developers can use this open API to create new applications based on Meme as well as easily create mashups with other products through YQL.”
As an example of what YQL allows developers to do, Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks told us in May, “YQL… allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo!’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.” Also from our May coverage:
According to Yahoo Chief Technologist Sam Pullara, the idea behind YQL (launched in October 2008) was to create an agnostic query language similar to SQL, a language familiar to most developers, and let developers use that language to use the Internet as a huge database. “If you make it universally and simply accessible so every application developer doesn’t have to learn every API, it’s be easier for developers to create apps from the data users have taken so much time to make available on the Internet.”
Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.
Interested developers can check out the Meme documentation. The API, the site says, “is intended for developers who are familiar with RESTful Web services.” In addition to offering superior support for multimedia content and simple access through YQL, Meme also has an excellent built-in repost function, an asymmetrical friendship model, and OAuth compliance.
