Yahoo will launch its platform for Web developers next week, part of an effort to attract more visitors by adding Facebook-like social networking features to Yahoo’s Web sites.

Yahoo hopes to drive more traffic to its sites by allowing people to share information about their interests and activities with friends. Like on Facebook, they’ll be able to create a network of connections and send alerts to those people when they upload photos to Flickr or comment on a story at Yahoo News, for example.
The platform will extend to non-Yahoo sites such as Amazon and Digg, so that users will be able to see from within Yahoo’s Web sites what their friends have been doing elsewhere on the Web. And third-party sites will be able to publish user activity back into the Yahoo network, which could help those sites draw more visitors.

The search company is making the data it stores about users — such as their contacts, interests and location — available for developers to build their applications. End users will be able to regulate which of their information friends and developers can see, said Yahoo officials, who previewed the platform in San Francisco on Friday.

It’s an ambitious project that required Yahoo to “rewire” its properties to create a single underlying platform that connects them all. Those services existed in the past as “silos” that allowed for little interaction between them.
Yahoo launched the first piece of the puzzle last week, a site called Yahoo Profiles where end users can manage their activities, interests and social connections in one place. Next week will mark the launch of the developer component. It’s built on top of Yahoo’s existing network infrastructure and consists broadly of three layers.

The first is the Yahoo Social Platform, a repository where Yahoo stores the personal data about its users, along with their “social graph,” or information about who their friends are. Above that is the Application Platform, which provides the development framework. And above that is the Yahoo Query Language, which developers will use to pull personal user data from Yahoo’s servers and write their programs. YQL is very similar to the widely used SQL database language, according to Yahoo.

The platform also makes use of public APIs such as Open Social, for aggregating user data from other social networking sites, and OAuth, a protocol for consuming and publishing personal data. The tools and documentation will be available for free download next week from the Yahoo Developer Network.

Yahoo officials gave examples of the types of applications it wants developers to build. If a person receives an e-mail telling them it’s a friend’s birthday, an application could allow them to view their friend’s Amazon.com Wish List from within Yahoo Mail. Another program might automatically upload photos received via Yahoo Mail to an online photo account, be that Flickr or a non-Yahoo service such as Shutterfly.

Part of the challenge will be getting Yahoo’s users to buy into the idea. At some time in the future, when they log into a Yahoo service they’ll see the Yahoo Activator, which will present a list of all their contacts pulled from Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger and other services. They’ll use this to build their connections list and decide who can see what information.

Activations can already be done at the new Yahoo Profiles site and with a beta of Yahoo Messenger 9 that was just released. Activations will be rolled out more widely in a few months when the option is presented to people when they log into their Yahoo Mail accounts, and at other Yahoo services after that.

Each new application will have to warn users about the data it plans to access, such as their address book, inbox or profile, and about who the information will be shared with. Yahoo will make certain selections by default that users can then alter.

During Diwali, Goddess Lakshmi is believed to visit homes that are well lit, so families decorate their homes. People wear their best clothes or buy new ones, children are given presents and new year greetings are exchanged through visits or Diwali cards. Thus, a Rangoli design is created on doorsteps to welcome everybody. Rangoli exudes a pattern in color that are specific for each region.

During Diwali, in the art of floor painting, the central rangoli design is the symbolic one denoting the deity or the theme. Motifs generally created are lotus, fish, birds, snakes etc. which reflects the unity of man and beast. Most of the rangoli designs are circular exuding a sense of endlessness of time. Celestial symbols such as the sun, moon and other zodiac signs are also common themes for rangoli. Layered with symbolism is the lotus denoting Goddess Lakshmi, the unfolding of life, the heart or the wheel.

During Diwali, two interfaced triangles are created that indicates the deity of learning, Sarswati. Encircling this is a 24-petal lotus flower border, the outer circle being decorated with Lakshmi’s footprints repeated in four corners. Sometimes the lotus petals are made in a triangular shape for variety. In north Bihar, Lakshmi’s feet are drawn at the door, the toes pointing inwards to indicate her entrance.

Again in Andhra Pradesh there is an eight-petal lotus (ashtadal kamal) and many geometric patterns forming the lotus. In Tamil Nadu the hridaya kamalam is an eight-pointed star meaning lotus of the heart. In Maharasthra too the lotus is a basic motif and designs like shankh kamal – shell lotus and thabak which means salver is in the shape of an eight-petal lotus with straight lines elaborated with curving lines to give it the appearance of a salver. In Gujarat alone there are said to be 1001 variations of the lotus which are drawn during Diwali, the festival when Goddess Lakshmi is worshiped. Other motifs are swastikas and conch shells.

All over the southern part of India the Diwali festival is marked by gaiety and prosperity. The rangolis drawn are peripheral. Most Rangolis are basically geometric patterns formed with dots and lines to make squares, circles, swastikas, lotus, trident, fish, conch shell footprints, creepers, trees bear testimony both to individual genius and community participation and many work for days together on single design.

The raw materials mainly used to make rangoli are edibles like rice flour, pulse and leaves. All over India, floor paintings are essentially white in color. White is a symbol of peace, purity and tranquility. The material used is rice flour or rice paste, because rice to all Indians is a sign of prosperity. Yet another symbol of prosperity is the color yellow. Turmeric yellow or ocher is also often used to fill in the white outlines. More often however, vermilion is used. Vermilion, is considered auspicious. Also used are pea green and rust brown.