Back in 2010, when I left Yahoo! to go and join Nokia, I wrote some words that at the time seemed full of hope for the future of the Geotechnologies group I'd left.

I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Time and changes of corporate heart have not been kind here. Maybe it's time to take a look at the state of the geo union.

Nothing on the interwebs is forever. Services start up and either become successful, get acquired or shut down. If they shut down they usually end up in TechCrunch's deadpool. The same applies for APIs and when they finally go offline, they usually end up in the Programmable Web deadpool.

At around 1.30 PM London time yesterday, the Yahoo! Maps API got added to the Programmable Web deadpool for good. Despite the announcement I wrote about last year that it was being shutdown on September 13, 2011, up until yesterday the API was very much alive and well and still serving up map tiles, markers and polylines via JavaScript.

Yahoo's JavaScript and AJAX API was the first mapping API I ever used and it now seems hard to remember when Yahoo's API offerings were the dominant player, always iterating and innovating. The Yahoo! API set formed and continued to underpin the majority of my online presence. When I wrote about leaving Yahoo! and joining Nokia in May of 2010 I said ...

So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

... and I meant every word of it. The Yahoo! APIs were stable, powerful and let create web experiences quickly and easily. But now a year later a lot has changed. I still use Flickr on a pretty much daily basis, but Delicious is no longer a Yahoo! property and I transitioned my other web presence from using YQL for RSS feed aggregation to use SimplePie as YQL was frequently down or just not working. The original core set of Yahoo! APIs I use in anger is now just down to Flickr and YUI.

Back when I used to work for Yahoo! I wrote a lot of posts for the Geo Technologies blog; for reasons partially explained in my last post, that blog is now offline, presumed dead. But one post that seems to keep catching people's imagination is the one in which I, somewhat tongue in cheek, codified the Six Non Golden Rules Of Geo. Much to my satisfaction, it keeps getting mentioned, although the full original post is inaccessible, as is the rest of that blog. Nate Kelso reproduced part of it, as did John Goodwin but until earlier today I'd not been able to find the full post.

Step forward the aforementioned John Goodwin who, with a bit of internet detective work, managed to find a mirror of the post. While I much prefer to link to blog posts rather than reproduce them in full, in this case I'm plagiarising myself and making an exception on the ground of inaccessibility, and have mirrored the post in full here. It's worth mentioning that this post was originally written in February of 2009, when I was still working for Yahoo! so it's a little out of date and was originally posted as ...

First a disclaimer; there's one elsewhere on this blog but this post merits another. I used to work for Yahoo! as part of the Geo Technologies group. I now work for Nokia as part of their Location group. The opinions and ideas expressed in this post are absolutely just my own, and should not be confused with, or taken for, those of my current or past employers. It's just me here.

You may not have realised it but Friday May 27th. was a sad day for the Geo industry in London. Even without the benefit of knowing what was going on from ex-colleagues inside the company, the signs were there if you knew where to look for them and how to read them.

Before the Internet, companies, teams and projects could fade quietly into anonymity and into oblivion. But on the Internet, everything is in public and it's much harder to hide the tell tale signs. API updates and bug fixes cease. A web site or blog stops being updated or goes down altogether. A Twitter feed stops being an active living thing and becomes merely a historical record. Ex-colleagues start following you on Twitter or you start getting connection requests on LinkedIn whilst other colleagues start polishing and updating their LinkedIn profiles.

And May 27th. 2011? That was the day that the last of the remaining members of my old team at Yahoo! Geo Technologies left the Yahoo! office in London and that was the day that Yahoo! ceased to have a Geo presence in the UK.

Delicious is dead! Long live Delicious. Like a lot of Delicious users, I recently received a mail urging me to authorise the transfer of my Delicious account and bookmarks to the new service once ownership transfers from Yahoo! to AVOS.

The reception to the news of Delicious's new owners has been ... varied. Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a post in favour of the transfer, but Violet Blue is not so sure. If you do a little bit of digging, you'll see that the new Delicious has the potential to be far more restrictive on what you can, and what you can't bookmark, especially where potentially offensive content is linked to. Offensive is a horribly vague and subjective term; one which means many different things to many different people.

A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it's justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven't we been here before?

Let's look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Looking back at my career over the last 20 or so years, it's immediately apparent that it's always been a bit geo. Geophysical seismic survey processing for natural resources (OK, mostly for oil and gas) for Digicon ... geo. Setting up operations for ERS-1, the European Space Agency's first remote sensing synthetic aperture radar satellite ... geo and rocket science. Short wave radio frequency planning to enable the BBC World Service to get transmissions into countries who would much prefer the BBC didn't broadcast there ... geo. Deploying the first geo-targeted ad system and rolling out a global place based view of the world internally and to the external developer community for Yahoo! ... totally geo. Granted, there were other roles which had no geo context whatsoever but I always seem to keep coming back to this vague and nebulous mixture of place, location, maps and geography that we term geo.

Some 4 years ago (actually 3 years and 10 months but let's round up for the sake of convenience) I wasn't really looking for a new role, but the opportunity arose to come and lead and engineering team for Yahoo! Now, four years later, it's time to move onto another role, but more of that in a moment.