Yahoo! has always prided itself as being… well, a Yahoo. Starting out as a hobby project in the early days when the Internet was still an uncool geek hobby, Yahoo transformed into the most visited website in the world . From its beginnings as a directory for websites Yahoo has grown with the Internet to become a whole on-line ecosystem. However, with the meteoric rise of Google, Yahoo has competition. It is no longer the coolest website on the block. One of the things Google has been leveraging have been their geek credentials. The company (Google) has positioned itself as a programmer friendly, innovative company and one of the cornerstones of this effort is the opening up of its API. In response Yahoo has gone on a major makeover effort. It changed its entire look including the Yahoo home page, Yahoo email, Yahoo maps and Yahoo search. It has added new services like Yahoo Music, Yahoo Video and Yahoo 360, and acquired great sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us. But the biggest thing in my opinion is the Yahoo Developer site. What I really liked about this is not so much the fact that they opened it up as the approach they took with it. Instead of simply publishing their API and a few examples, the Yahoo development team took the effort to create good documentation, including patterns, best practices etc. They went ahead and added a blog, allowing their developers to post on the site, which gives it the accessible image. Yahoo went the extra mile and that shows through. The latest API they have opened up is Yahoo authentication. Lets see how the developer community responds to this - I can only see more web 2.0 goodness from this development. Let the pretenders to the throne watch out for the Yahoo! is ready…