Yahoo! to release Shopping API

From Jeff McManus in email: " Just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know that this morning Yahoo is releasing a new product for developers/web site owners, the Yahoo! Shopping API. The idea is to let folks use Web services calls to pull data from our comparison shopping database to republish on their Web sites or within software applications. More info will be posted soon on the Y! Search blog (http://www.ysearchblog.com/) and the Yahoo! Developer Network blog (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog). The main product page containing documentation and other resources will be located at http://developer.yahoo.net/shopping/. This should all be available on the site by 10:30AM Pacific this morning."
 

Haven't had a chance to look at this yet -- rushing off to OScon -- but what Jeff reports sounds good. I'm excited to see "Web 2.0" style web services -- that is, syndicating content and services outward, where they can be used by other sites, hopefully creating new services by combining pieces from multiple sites (as Paul Rademacher did with housingmaps.com -- rather than just inbound web services, where people can build alternate interfaces to a central site. So the real test of whether this is interesting is going to be whether people start building new services in which Yahoo! shopping is just a component, rather than the main point.