Yahoo Opens Up a Massive Amount of Data with Its New Updates Firehose

Yahoo has been aggregating updates from a big variety of websites for several months now. Users could see in one place updates from Twitter, YouTube or Last.fm and also post new ones with Yahoo Update. The feature is interesting enough and has been popping up in more and more places across Yahoo properties. But Yahoo is now making a very interesting move by opening up that data to everyone. The Yahoo Updates Firehose will give developers access to real-time data from most Yahoo sites, but also from tens of third-party sites including Twitter.

“The Yahoo! Developer Network is excited to announce the initial release of the Yahoo! Updates Firehose service. The Updates Firehose is a web service for accessing and searching the full, real-time index of Yahoo! Updates,” Micah Laaker, director, Product Management and User Experience at Yahoo Developer Platforms, wrote.

“Yahoo! Updates aggregates social updates from Yahoo! and across the Web: It includes a real-time feed of every public action taken on our network (such as the 45,000+ comments on the News story about the Healthcare reform bill recently passed in Congress) and elsewhere around the Web that users have authorized Yahoo! to make available,” he explained.

Yahoo has provided some numbers to show what is available with the new Yahoo Updates Firehose and they’re pretty impressive. The company says developers will get access to 750,000 ratings, 8,000 reviews and 150,000 comments every day and this is only from Yahoo’s own sites.

Add to this the huge amounts of data Yahoo is collecting from its various partners, including full, indirect access to Twitter’s firehose, and it adds up to quite a bit. Developers will be able to access the data using Yahoo’s own Query Language (YQL) from a number of Yahoo APIs including the Updates API, the Status API and the Contacts API.

So far, Twitter has been the only game in town and it has only granted access to its full stream to several third-party services, including all three main search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. Facebook is also expected to release a firehose API, perhaps as soon as its upcoming developer conference, F8. Yahoo’s offering trumps all that and is one of the few to enable access to such a variety of sites and data.